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n5yrrv | why are all the bees dying? | Everywhere I go I see another dead bee and it saddens me. I’m not scientist but I understand they are critical to our environment. Why are they dying?! | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Answer: nobody knows for certain if there's one cause or if it's a combination of many. Some hypotheses include: * Habitat destruction, particularly as urban populations expand into former habitat areas. * Climate change - as the climate warms, bees cannot tolerate warmer temperatures, but also catastrophic weather events become more common in a warmer climate. * Overuse of pesticides - to maximize food yields, farmers are using pesticides in larger quantities to reduce other insect populations that are considered pests. * New parasites expanding out of their range as climate warms, but also transport through international trade.",
"Pesticides and not enough food for them because people kill wild flowers to plant ones that are good looking but don't help the bees much (by blooming all at the same time, or by being inaccessible for bees altogether)",
"Sounds like there could be a big issue in the area that you live. If you live in an area with a lot of manicured lawns, it's likely due to pesticides and/or habitat destruction (grass lawns are basically food deserts for pollinators) or a local hive could be afflicted with a parasite or disease of some kind. If you want to feel like you're contributing to a solution, build a bee motel, plant or encourage the growth of native wildflowers as well as local flowering \"weeds\"; if you have the opportunity, replace your grass with a flowering ground cover alternative that thrives in your area (such as clover or lyreleaf sags, etc) Aside from feeding bees, another benefit to alternative lawns is that they typically require minimal to no mowing (which is a HUGE contributor to emissions that not many people consider.) And show respect for all pollinators, not just bees and butterflies but wasps and moths, too.",
"1. Do not believe every thing you read in the media 2. Just because you see a dead bee or three doesn't mean all the bees are dying 3. Bees only live for about 3 weeks out foraging 4. If you are in the northern hemisphere the bees that are foraging at the moment have just come through a whole winter and are very old Taking all of the above into consideration there are external factors that are impacting bee numbers, some of them are: 1. lack of good quality pollen (mono crops/orchard 2. over use of pesticides and fungicides 3. disease, virus and parasite loading (varroa mite) Some of the things that are not causing all the bees to die: 1. 4 or 5G cell towers 2. High voltage power lines 3. moving bees between crops (if the pollen has the right amino acids) 4. feeding cane or beet sugar for carbohydrates nearly 30 years in backyard and commercial beekeeping experience in New Zealand and the UK"
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n5z33d | How does in-built "unsubscribe" functionality in Gmail work? | When you receive bunch of promotional emails from a website, sometimes there is a link at the bottom of the email to unsubscribe from similar future emails but sometimes there is no such link. However, Gmail provides with a button to unsubscribe from these emails regardless without visiting any other website. How does it work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The email headers (which aren't normally visible to the user) will normally contain unsubscribe links if the email is from a reputable sender. When gmail identifies that an unsubscribe link is there it will give you the option of unsubscribing in addition to reporting the spam. You can view these headers by selecting a message and then selecting \"show original\"."
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n61dg1 | How exactly is a stock price decided?How do we see a particular price on the screen? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"What we usually see on the screen is the price the last share was sold/bought for. So if someone decide to sell a share for less, than the value shown on the screen, the value goes down. If someone sells at a higher price than on screen, price goes up. So basically, the price is decided by how much the 1st person is willing to pay for it, then change over time with how much people are willing to buy afterward."
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n61nf3 | why is it when someone says something funny we repeat to ourselves? | I've recently noticed that whenever I make a joke to friends they repeat the part they find funny. Like they say it to themselves, or something like that. I also found myself doing that as well whenever something funny is said unexpectedly, and I repeat it while laughing. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think there are 2 main reasons: 1. You repeat the part where you found it funny to laugh again. 2. You repeat the part to not forget the punchline of the joke for telling the joke later."
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n61rn3 | Why do we get goosebumps when we experience something that we really like? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a sort of layover from our fight or flight response. Back when we were hairy, if we got in to a (potentially) dangerous situation, we'd get an adrenaline rush. Accompanying that, our hairs would stand on end. This would make us look bigger to whatever predator was being a threat. We still get this reaction now, even though we're not as hairy. So, the mechanism that used to cause our hairs to stand up just gives us goosebumps instead."
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n61v88 | What makes hail instead of snow? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Surprisingly, the two aren't really related. Snow is basically just rain that has frozen on its way down. It happens only when it's cold at the ground level. Hail is a little more interesting--it begins as a droplet of water in a cloud, but instead of falling downward, if the cloud is a very strong storm, the droplet might be kicked *up* by strong winds. This takes it high into the sky, where the temperature drops to so cold it freezes solid, even in the middle of summer. Eventually, it falls back through the cloud, hitting other droplets as it falls and getting very wet. Then... it might get sucked up again! Rise, freeze, fall, wet, repeat. Each cycle builds up another layer on the hailstone until it becomes so large that even the strong winds can't suck it back up and it falls to the ground as a big clump of solid ice. Interesting thing about this hail growing cycle: the friction of all the hailstones hitting all the little water droplets as they fall is believed to be what causes storm clouds to build up the static electricity that causes lightning!",
"Hail requires different temperatures at different altitudes and an up draught to be created so rain forms in the cloud and is then forced back up through the cloud by the up draught freezing on the way through the cloud. Repeat this several times with a new layer of frozen water being added each time it passes up and down the cloud you have hail, when the up draught can no longer lift up the hail it falls to the ground. - URL_0"
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n61wtq | Why do internet providers and telecommunication companies have similar or identical prices for their packages? Wouldn't slightly lowering the cost give the illusion of 'same speed lower prices' and improve their business? | I understand that at some point operational costs come into play but wouldn't they automatically quote a price much more or decently greater than it? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most ISPs have a \"monopoly\" in a particular area with next to no competition (or any serious competition). A competitor with lower prices isn't going to take away so much business that it becomes a threat. So the bigger company essentially sets the price and the others base theirs off of that.",
"If you undercut your competitors price a little bit to gain some customers, then they do the same, it just creates a feedback look where you both will eventually end up with low prices and no profits. It's easier and more profitable to have your marketing department advertise gimmicky features and meaningless stats about the quality of your service compared to your competitor.",
"Some would call it price-fixing (That is, companies getting together and agreeing to charge the same price so nobody loses out - everyone gets a bigger slice of the pie). ISPs would deny it and say that with something like internet access, costs are mostly fixed - they all use the same infrastructure (Within most areas - ductwork, cables etc), there's a limited amount of civils companies that can dig trenches etc, so they supply their services at a roughly similar cost to each company, and the back-end equipment is much the same (Cisco, Juniper etc, etc)."
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n625fl | do short people have super hearts | I always wondered with people with no legs if they have a "super heart", meaning since the heart doesn't have to pump blood back and forth from the legs, if they don't become supreme athletes in the rest of their body or if the heart has to work much less hard. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If it’s attached to your body and alive, it has a blood supply. If it has a blood supply, your heart supplies it with blood. People with no legs do not have “super hearts”. They have regular hearts. Like regular hearts, they can train their hearts to become fit, or they can allow their hearts to become unfit. The lack of legs is actually a hindrance in some ways - we rely on our legs to help with our circulatory system a lot, in both returning blood to our heart and in producing the new blood cells to keep our blood replenished."
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n62kza | how do "tax haven" countries survive without taxing corporations or individuals? | Where do the governments get money from? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not about 0% tax. It's about almost 0%. The idea is to make it a very small amount to attract people in from elsewhere. A small percentage of a *lot* of money can be bigger than a reasonable percentage of a small amount of money.",
"Tax havens do collect taxes. They don't collect taxes on specific things, or demand a lot less than other countries. The cayman islands are the most extreme example. They only collect import tarrifs, sell work licenses and have a tax on tourist bed rentals. So even they tax things, just not things that big international companies are interested in. Panama is less extreme. They tax locals just normally, but money earned outside the country isn't taxed at all. Also being a tax haven makes people found daughter companies in your country, for wich you can demand a fee. A corporation won't care to pay some 50k$ for that when they save billions in taxes over the years"
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n63b1a | why does Starship make the horizontal flip instead of landing lime their other rocket? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because falling horizontally allows you to slow down using air resistance, which is increased when surface area is increased. This saves for the very last moment, where the rocket flips and then scrubs the remaining velocity with engine power. Braking with the engines exclusively would cost more fuel and thus more mass you'd have to slow down. This multiplies, the larger your rocket is, which is why the heavier Starship tries to manage with as little fuel as possible.",
"It needs to shed velocity through attrition, otherwise you would have to load a lot more fuel for the final landing burn, making it more expensive to launch, more difficult and risky to land."
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n63c44 | What ensures that no one is generating the exact same keypair by pure chance | I am aware that I am probably mixing up some topics in this question but lets do this: While the chances of this happening are probably unbelivably small, humanity is generating a lot of (RSA) keypairs on a daily basis. If my understanding is correct, websites use asymetrical keypairs to provide SSL certificates. How is it, that we never had two websites that are using the exact same keypair by pure chance? I vaguely remember a demo site by google showing that this is possible (using an outdated algorithm if my memory servs). Once again, I'm really sorry for my lack of knowledge and my failure in articulating this question properly but I really want to know. \^\^ | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Nothing really, other than the chance of such a thing being lower than winning the lottery several times in a row.",
"> While the chances of this happening are probably unbelivably small, humanity is generating a lot of (RSA) keypairs on a daily basis Not enough to defeats the probabilities. The probably that two random 100 digit numbers are the same is 1/10^(100). Using the [birthday problem]( URL_0 ), you need about 10^50 different numbers for it to be statistically probable for a single collision. If each person on earth (less than 10^10 people) generated a random 100 digit number every second of every day (less than 10^6 numbers per day) of every year (less than 10^4 days per year) it would take over 10^30 years to make 10^50 different numbers.",
"Modern crypto algorithms have possible combinations in the \"more than the atoms in the solar system\" territory. Beyond which, if two people did generate the same keypair by chance, it would likely not be discovered anyone unless one happened to try and decrypt something intended for the other.",
"Collisions are not really a problem, because for any public key infrastructure system (SSL or otherwise) you must have a certificate authority (CA). The CA is a trusted entity that generates issues the certificate and verifies its authenticity. Websites for not generate their own SSL certs, but purchase them from trusted CAs. A CA will not generate duplicate certificates, so if 2 parties do have duplicate certs, they will come from different CAs. It may also help to understand how SSL works. When you visit a https website it sends your computer it's public key which your computer uses to verify the identity of the website. Your computer then generates it own symmetric (shared) encryption key and then encrypts it using the public of the website. When you encrypt using the public key only someone with the private key can decrypt it. For this reason private keys are never shared. Your computer then sends the encryption key to the website and says I would like to use this encryption key for the rest of our communications. The website then decrypts the new encryption key and uses it for all future encryption with your computer."
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n63h7c | De novo peptide sequencing | I'm working on a graphic design task for a company with scientists who work on cell sciences. They want me to do icons for said post title. They're great at their job in their field of science, but not as great to explain their work to someone as simple as me (or maybe I got porridge for brains). Could someone put there explain step by step on what this is? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a way of finding out the amino acid sequence of a protein without any prior knowledge about it (hence de novo). The protein gets blasted apart with electricity and laser light and the fragments are analyzed with something called a mass spectrometer. Clever math can then be used on the output of that to determine what amino acids in what order make up the protein."
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n63viy | There are some hormones that make us Happy , so , are there any hormones that make us sad ? If not how do we feel sad ? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It works similarly to darkness and coldness which are the abscence of light and heat. In the same way, the abscence of rewarding neurotransmitters makes us depressed and anxious.",
"I'm no expert, but there are definitely hormones (or lack of) that make us feel not only sad, but depressed, angry, tired, wired etc... We're basically just a big mix of chemicals and have very little control over or internal emotions. For example, I have hypothyroidism, which is basically a hormone deficiency. I got diagnosed around 5yrs ago, but I'm pretty sure I've been suffering with it for 15+yrs. Some of the symptoms of hypothyroidism are depression, fatigue, sleeplessness, weight gain etc... Since having medication to regulate my thyroid, I'm basically a different person. I have energy and I'm chatty AF. Honestly feels like I'm on drugs lol.",
"In women excessive oestrogen can lead to sadness but generally a lack of hormones is what is understood to be happening when a person is sad"
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n65j1i | Why do cloud move as a whole thing and not dissolve in the wind? | I live in a windy place. Right now, I am looking at clouds moving really fast. But cloud are just water vapor no? So how can they keep their shape and move as a whole piece instead of just being blown away by the wind? Edit : thank you for all those detailed explanation ! I guess I'll spend way more time looking at clouds now !! | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They do not move as a whole. Each individual tiny droplet of water in the cloud is moving independently of all the other tiny little droplets of water. But they are all moving independently based on essentially the same forces being applied to them. If the wind is blowing in One direction and doesn't have a lot of different cheering forces, then it is going to push the whole cloud in one direction, and there won't be a bunch of forces present to rip the cloud apart.",
"Think of a cloud as a three dimensional graph in the sky of a volume where the relative humidity has reached 100% and moisture has condensed into tiny droplets of liquid water. You might see a cloud moving across the sky as a unified thing when in fact new droplets are condensing into liquid at the leading edge while droplets are evaporating back into vapor at the trailing edge.",
"Just one quick thing to add: Clouds are really really big. It's hard to gauge how big they are because they tend to be rather far away. They look substantial because you're looking through a lot of water droplets. The light needs to pass through enough volume of cloud to be scattered. But they don't have a sharp edge, so the parts that look like \"cloud\" are very large and so despite the fact that there's all that wind, the small scale changes aren't very noticeable because there needs to be a significant change of a large volume to change the scattering of light.",
"You feel wind as something blowing past you. But the column of air is all moving together, and the cloud is simply visible suspended particles of water within that column. Look closely to clouds, especially if they are well-defined and have that cauliflower look, before they start to pull apart like cotton candy. While they are still sharp, if you focus on one spot you can actually see them expanding like slow mushroom clouds. It's very cool."
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n65nsb | How is it that some video games have a huge Gb size than others? (more details under) | My two examples are as follow: Call of Duty: Black Ops III - 100Gb (160Gb with DLCs) Monster Hunter: World - 48Gb (96Gb with DLCs) How is it that Black Ops III is way heavier than Monster Hunter: World, even though World requires more power from my PC for the minimal settings needed (graphic card, processor...) than Black Ops III? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Video games are made up mostly of just two things: code (what tells the machine how to run the game) and assets (all of the art that appears in the game). Code is actually pretty small, so it doesn't take up too much space. Assets, on the other hand, can be massive, and they usually represent the majority of the size of the game, especially these days as graphics tend to be very high-resolution. I would guess that BlOps3 is bigger because its art direction is aimed at realism, whereas MonHun leans more towards stylized art that doesn't require quite so much space on the disc."
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n65qbu | why we want something when we can't have it, but don't want something when we can? | Like, if I want a can of beer and I don't have any in the house then I'll want it more. If I have a fridge full of cans, I don't want any beer. Or as Eminem said: "you want them when they don't want you, as soon as they do, feelings change" | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You attach a special value to something you can't have. You have something to look forward to, to strive for something. The fantasy you build up in your head is greater than reality. As soon as you have it, this special value diminishes."
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n66orf | Can insects, crabs, spiders, and other animals with an exoskeleton become overweight or obese? | If so, how does it work? Do they just molt into larger skeletons? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Former tarantula owner here. Tarantulas can be overfed, which is visible by the size of their butt. It can get dangerous when an overfed tarantula tries to climb and falls, as the butt can rip open and the animal can bleed to death from such a wound easily, as their butt contains most of their blood and also their heart. The butt is not enclosed by a rigid exoskeleton, but rather a very soft skinlike one that can expand. If your tarantula's butt is smaller than its body, you can give it a snack. If the butt is the same size or about 1.5x the size of the body, you have a happy little spider. If the butt gets larger than that, your eight legged friend needs a break from food. In adult tarantulas it's entirely possible to wait several months until the next feeding, they are adapted to survive scarcity of food. Most of the time, an adult tarantula will only have a thin butt after changing into its new skin - but always wait for at least 3 days or even a week before feeding a freshly molted T, as their exoskeleton will be very soft and fragile, showing white fangs and joints that can easily be damaged if the animal attempts to hunt. Let your spider friend do their yoga stretches for a few days and then give them a juicy cricket :) Edit: Whoa, thanks for all the awards people! This really blew up :D I just love spiders and sharing what I know. Have a grand day, internet strangers! < 3",
"Vertebrates usually can’t swap in a larger skeleton when they get too heavy, and so they just expand outwards and get fat. Arthropods *can* molt into a larger exoskeleton when they’re getting a bit snug, and so instead of getting fat they actually get taller and stronger. Your typical American lobster is about a foot long and five pounds, but once in a great while fishermen will catch a three foot long, forty pound monster that has been outcompeting everyone else for decades. These beasts get thrown back in, as they’re the kings and queens of the breeding cycle and keep the population up. Land arthropods are more limited in size because their heavy armor and inefficient respiratory systems don’t scale well.",
"Hey I posted about this on r/askscience a while ago. I have a PhD in insect physiology specializing in insect metabolism. Insects can develop obesity like symptoms and what looks like type 2 diabetes. The extra fat doesn't make them bigger in their exoskeleton, but does get packed in there. Here's a paper on dragonflies that get obese! & #x200B; [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"I remember learning about an experiment in college where an animal with an exoskeleton (a mantis or roach maybe?) has neurons disabled that allowed it to essentially feel the pressure inside its body to tell if it should eat more or not. They continued to eat until their shells cracked open and they died. So I’m guessing there’s only a certain tolerance and they likely have a way to prevent it from happening through overeating.",
"I had a black forest scorpion that I accidentally overfed. He basically expanded out the sides of his armor with what looked like black skin. He was like that for a few months without any obvious health problems. I gave him away when I moved, so I don’t know how long he lived.",
"They absolutely can! For some exoskeleted creatures they can get so fat that they start to get gaps between the pieces of their exoskeleton where you can see skin/fat. See this pic of an obese emperor scorpion! [Fat Scorpion]( URL_0 ) Edit: hmmm it appears that that particular one is pregnant, but you get the idea.",
"For lobsters if they get too big they become physically unable to get out of the old shell at molting time and die."
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n66u2w | Why does our breathing affects our heartbeats speed when we do nothing? | If breathing is mostly done by lungs so why does breathing affects the speed of heart beats. As from what i understand, lungs inhale and exhale oxygen and heart pumps oxygenated blood. Then why? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you breathe in, you may notice your heart beat start to go faster. This is what we call respiratory arrhythmia and is a physiological phenomenon. The reason is that when we exhale, there's higher intrathoracic pressure i.e. Compression of ghe lungs forces air out. This increased pressure stimulates the Vagus, a nerve, that - among others - causes the heart to beat slower. So exspiration == > pressure go brrrrr == > Vagus stimulated == > Vagus make heart go less brrrrr When we inhale, it's basically just the opposite effect, the expansion of your ribcage increases the volume of your thorax, so the pressure drops. Thus, the vagus is stimulated less, and so your heart starts to beat slower. To sum this up: Inspiration == > pressure go less brrrrr == > Vagus less stimulated == > Vagus not make heart go less brrrrr as much as before == > heart go more brrrrr",
"A lot of good answers here. But I still haven’t seen the actual term mentioned, it’s called “Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia”, or “RSA”. Having a large RSA means that your body’s heart rate changes a lot with your breathing, and low RSA means it doesn’t change a lot. Research has shown having a large RSA is actually indicative of better heart and lung health. URL_0"
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n672wl | Doge coin, how its made, how its used and why its worth what it's worth. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Dogecoin is made by using a computer to complete math equations. It is used for meme value and speculation. It is worth what it's worth because of wild speculation. Basically it's a meme you can buy, and the more popular it gets the more people want to either buy in on the meme, or just buy some in the hope they can sell later at a profit.",
"It's not used for anything and it's only worth anything because people put money into it, when it comes to block chain technology it is literally built to shit in the face of many principals of good design. That being said value is found by what someone is willing to pay for something in an economy, not what it's actually \"worth\" so ppl tweet about it, meme about it, fomo it, and the price goes up. It will probably crash and turn alot of ppl off of good crypto when it does, or it will stay a meme coin and become a light store of value like btc(but not at such a high price.) (it'll never really be like btc because it generates so many new coins when mined, inflation is ridiculous) Edit for those older than 5: to clarify based on the below reply \"never be like btc\" means that it will not hold the same value per coin at such high lvls due to the inflation rate competing against the fiat market cap, it can go to 1 or even 100 dollars, but if doge was worth the price of btc today it would have a market cap over the total narrow money supply of the world and it adds over 5 BILLION coins to its supply each year for many many years to come(not all value of the world, just all fiat, to be clear)",
"Doge is mooning because it's mildly humorous and, in my opinion more importantly, it's the cheapest alt coin on Robinhood. Simply put, it has greater market access and the platform providing access to it is more simple to set up. The people who were FOMOing on GME, BB, NOK, AMC were able to pivot right into Doge, and whales like Musk who pumped GME pivoted just prior, and with significantly less risk. Ultimately, Doge cannot sustain its value. It has no coin cap, and it will inflate indefinitely."
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n673i8 | Why does water evaporate over time even though it's not at boiling temperature? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Because some of the water molecules have enough energy to escape into the air. That's why it doesn't take much energy to boil water, room temperature is already pretty close to its boiling point."
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n67hf4 | If mitochondria have their own DNA, how do they reproduce between human generations? | Is it somehow "included" within the larger set of chromosomes? If so, why is it still considered separate from the rest of our DNA? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gx5duv2",
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"text": [
"Mitochondrial DNA has its own ribosomal genes and replication genes. Some genes necessary for their proliferation may come from the nuclear one but the way they are designed, their genome is kinda independent. Also the way they are passed from generations is through maternal line. It is because we inherit cytoplasmic contents when the sperm fertilizes the eggs hence mitochondria too.",
"The egg cell has a nucleus with DNA in it, and it also has mitochondria, separately. When the egg is fertilized, the egg's mitochondria go with it and start reproducing within each cell of the developing embryo"
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n67qzu | what is the difference between tank cannons and artillery cannons | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Artillery usually fires larger shells with larger impact and explosive force (aka, they can do more damage). Artillery is also designed for *indirect* fire, and has a much longer effective firing range. Meaning you can angle it up pretty high and fire your shell a lot farther than a tank cannon can fire, and you're trying to intimidate enemy forces and possibly do damage to them but it's less accurate on average. A tank cannon is a smaller caliber, it's lighter, it has a lower effective firing range and it's intended to deal direct damage against targets (enemy tanks/vehicles, for instance).",
"Artillery: indirect fire, i.e. you shoot at the right point in the sky so the shell falls down on the enemy at the correct position. Tanks: direct fire, i.e. you shoot in an almost straight line, just compensating enough for bullet drop."
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n68fw7 | How does someone become a stunt-person? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Stunt Performers have a union, called [SAMP]( URL_0 ). On their website they discuss the skill areas identified for their members, and other aspects of their industry. It's a high-fitness and high-knowledge profession, planning stunts to maintain safety is much more of the work than actually shooting takes in front of the camera. When a producer is looking for a stunt performer, they might work with the union or it might be a task assigned to the casting director."
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n68j75 | what is the x in the .docx file | Always wondered why document files save as .docx and not .docs what does the x mean here? And why are pdf files not .pdfx then? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The X version is much more heavily based on XML - it’s much more readable as a standard and there is more information that can be accurately saved. It also much smaller than traditional DOC files. The DOC/DOCX was created so word and newer office versions could distinguish between the old and new formats. PDFs etc don’t need to do this as their standard just changes but the format hasn’t.",
"The X stands for XML. Originally all the Microsoft Office file formats like .doc were propriatary. This meant that you needed Microsoft Word to open and edit .doc files. There were some attempts to make third party tools to open and edit these formats but without the documentation describing what everything does and what it is for this is very hard. Microsoft would also come with updates that would break the third party tools and refuse to open files that were created with these third party tools. However this was a problem for organizations like schools and governments as they would then require that everyone they sent documents bought the official Microsoft Office package. This was of course what Microsoft intended. However this strategy almost backfired as politicians demanded that the documents published had to be in an open format that could be opened and edited with free and open source software. Some government organizations started to switch from Microsoft Office to Open Office. Microsoft did try several things to please the authorities while still making sure people still had to buy Microsoft Office. They released some documentation on the file format and even some limited software that could read these files and edit them somewhat. This meant that while it was technically following government specifications of being open source this was limited in practice. Part of this was that they changed how the documents were stored from the propriatary binary format to a variant which looked confusingly like the competing Open Document Format with XML files packaged inside a ZIP file. This new format was named Office Open XML and got the x in the filename extension. And with this most authorities were willing to accept it. It can be debated if Microsoft is actually complying with the laws as there is still no open source tools which is fully compatible with Microsoft Office. If you save a document as .docx in Word and then open it in LibreOffice Writer it may not look the same. Similarly if you go the other way."
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n68lnc | If you keep sharpening knives or swords (or whatever) don't they eventually wear away? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"gx5k7nz"
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"text": [
"Yes, that's exactly what happens. Sharpening a blade involves removing material. Eventually you remove so much that you need a new blade."
],
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7
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n69k9l | Why is it harder to stop laughing once someone tells you not to laugh? | Have you ever tried with friends to not laugh for a period of time? Why is it funnier when you know that you shouldn’t laugh? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gx624hi"
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"text": [
"Human nature. Like when you have to be silent in the library and your body instinctively bust's out the loudest fart?"
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n6a1g4 | Why is declining birth rates a problem and more importantly what kind of changes would need to take place for a society to function with a decline before steadying out again at a lower rate? More than "ITS BAD HAVE BABIES" like the news always says. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Declining birthrates in themselves are not a problem (in fact some environmentalists argue its a good thing). The problem is that - in your typical Western country - declining birthrates causes secondary economic issues. Broadly speaking, our economies are set up that the working population of younger healthier adults pays taxes to take care of the older retired, unhealthier adults. This works great in traditional scenarios, where the elderly die, and there is a constant stream of new workers to pay tax. The 'problem' is that these days there is better medicine and quality of life, so there are more retired elderly people living longer to support, and there are not enough babies being born to support them in future, assuming nothing changes. And it's easier to ask people to have more babies than to change how society's economics are structured.",
"There are a lot of implications on how a declining birth rate would have on an economy, but I think one of the stronger arguments is that with an aging workforce, there are going to be more position vacancies than employed folks, as there are less people generally speaking to take jobs. General vacancies cost organizations, and also when there are less people to plug into positions, the burden of other workloads (which won’t have people in them) falls into other people in the team, causing stress and burnout in extreme cases, which of course has a price tag as well.",
"If birth rate declines below replacement levels the population starts to shrink over time. A shrinking population has a serious economic impact, especially as people age. It is difficult to provide for services for the elderly when there are more elderly people than there are workers. The solution is to allow immigration from countries with higher birth rates."
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n6a4eg | Why is yield to call higher than yield to maturity if bonds are trading at a discount? | I understand the basics of bonds and yields, but don't get the "why or how" of yield to call being higher than yield to maturity. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gx5ugsr"
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"text": [
"Calls always happen before maturity (there's no value for an option to repay the bond after maturity). So when a bond is trading at a discount, yield to call means you recover the discount earlier. In very simple terms think of a zero, both are priced at 97, one gives you 100 in a year (yield to call) the other gives you 100 in two years (yield to maturity). It's pretty obvious that the first has a higher yield in that case, right?"
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n6bdo6 | Why do we seek out sad music when we are sad? Wouldn't we want happy music to cheer up? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gx61eg1"
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"text": [
"It's called Catharsis - URL_0 It's a way of purging your negative emotion by allowing yourself to explore it and experience it fully. The idea is that you don't try to ignore this deeper emotional problem with positive things, but instead accept what you feel until you can internalize it and resolve it. Also sometimes it's just good to know that you're not alone in how you feel, that other people experience sadness and sorrow in the way that you feel, and to express that (push it out) through music and stuff."
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n6bk71 | What impact does ever increasing organic food demand has on the environment? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Depends on what you're measuring. More organic generally means less petrochemical product usage (i.e. less herbicide, fungicide, pesticide, and fertilizer). However, more organic also means more land, water, and energy usage, as organic crops are considerably less efficient, meaning you need to grow more plant material to feed the same amount of people. The energy usage issue is the big one, though; you're essentially trading lessened petrochemical products for increased carbon emissions into the atmosphere, unless you can provide entirely renewably-powered energy for the input products for your crops, as well as the energy needed to tend them (e.g. fuel for your tractor). In the overwhelming majority of the world, that energy is oil and coal. Thus, whether or not organic is \"better\" broadly depends on where you're growing it. In North America, where the soil is naturally extremely fertile and you have the benefit of winter (i.e. free pesticide and forced rest cycle), it *might* be a slight net benefit. In places like Brazil where you basically have to nuke the soil with chemicals in order to get anything to grow at all, it'd be an immense net loss from an environmental perspective, and that's *before* you account for all the additional deforestation in order to open up the additional land needed for the less efficient organic crops. Not to mention there's no solid definition as to what \"organic\" actually means; it's essentially a marketing gimmick, not an actual scientific or agricultural definition.",
"Organic farming is inefficient compared to indistrial techniques so there is much more loss to rot, disease and pests, which means you have to plant more crops, which require more land, water, nutrients, workers, higher prices, etc....The end product is good for the consumer, but it's very inefficient and nit practical fir a large population."
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n6btnd | Why are bubbles round? | I looked deeply into a bottle of soda and realised all air bubbles are perfectly spherical, just different sizes. It’s the same when rubbing soap or blowing into water. Could anyone explain why this is? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gx67sob"
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"text": [
"Bubbles have liquid surfaces, and (most) liquid surfaces have \"surface tension\"...like a thin elastic skin. The tension is caused by the liquid molecules all being attracted to each other. This tension also means the surface has energy and natural systems are always trying to reduce the energy. Since the energy scales with the amount of surface, the contraction/tension is going to try to minimize the amount of surface. But there's a constraint...there's gas trapped inside the bubble and it can't get out. The volume of that gas is fixed by the amount of gas, the temperature, and the pressure. So the bubble is trying to solve \"What's the smallest area I can achieve while still having a fixed volume?\" And it turns out the answer to that is a sphere. This is also why the bubble \"vanishes\" when you pop it...when you pop it, you let the gas out. Now the volume constraint is gone and the surface contracts as much as it can."
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n6bvmu | Metals can memorize their "original shapes" and shift back to those states when under heat. But what actually dictates the metal's original shape? | I just saw a post in which a deformed paper clip and spring were placed on a heater and went back to their shapes. But why are those their 'original' states? What do you have to do to change a metal's original shape? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gx66qo6"
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"text": [
"It's all about heat treatment, aka \"temper\". The \"original shape\" is whatever shape it was in the last time it got the right heat treatment to \"set\" the alloy. Like /u/fishingforworth said, that's usually heating it to a high temperture. Then you cool it back down and bend it (within limits). That changes some internal solid phases of the metal. If you heat it to an intermediate temperature, the metal will revert to the original phase and, in the process, back to the original shape. If you \\*hold\\* it in the new shape and heat it up higher, it will set to the new shape. The general process of heating things up until all the internal stress relaxes out is called \"annealing\", it's very common with metal and glass working. The fact that bent shape-memory alloys move without any outside force is a dead give-away that they've got internal stress. You're basically annealing them and letting that internal stress relax by going back to the shape they were in back when their structure was first formed. If you re-anneal it in a new shape, that's the new \"original shape\"."
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n6c838 | if nerve impulses always have the same ”strength”, then why does it feel different when an ant and an elephant steps on my foot? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gx66s9n"
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"text": [
"Number of nerves that get activated by the injury is different, and also the strength of the impulses for a nerve may be the same, but there's a difference between one signal per hour and 1000 signals per second."
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n6c9dv | Why is it hard to swallow 2-4 times continously? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"I answered this question quite some time ago on this sub. I'll copy paste my comment from then: Here is an excerpt from a paper: Materials in the mouth (food or saliva) and the cortical drive to the tongue and the submental muscles are necessary for initiation of VS. VS stands for voluntary swallow (as opposed to SS, the spontaneous one). I'd have to dig a little deeper to find you a mechanism. But it seems having something to swallow is necessary in addition to the cortical drive (your brain sending the order to initiate the sequential muscle contractions involved). And when you swallow once, you clear some of the saliva, conceivably dipping below the threshold required for the next swallow. This suggests the maximum rate of voluntary swallows depends on the rate of salivary secretion (and that depends on things beyond your control like what else is or has been in your mouth in terms of food and drink and also many other things like your autonomic activation with the sympathetic (fight or flight) or parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous systems). However you will notice that if you try hard enough, you can induce a swallow anyway even if you just had one a few seconds back, but you'll also notice you're flexing some other muscles in your neck that actually stimulate salivary secretion, but this still poses a limit of the maximum swallowing frequency, because you can only force secretion so often in a minute. Here is the paper I went through but I think you need access for it: URL_0",
"Swallowing when your mouth is too dry may lead to chocking, so there is an instinct to have a certain amount of saliva or other fluid in your mouth to swallow."
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n6cyha | Why can animals eat the same food all their life and not get digusted by the taste, but humans can't? | For example, cows eat hay all the time, but when a human eats the same food repeatedly they get disgusted by the taste even tho they liked the taste initially. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Starve yourself for a day, see if you're still disgusted by the left-overs from two days ago that you didn't eat for one day. Hunger is a powerful thing, and animals don't have a guarantee that they'll be able to find 3 meals a day like some of us humans (there are places in the world where populations of humans starve, as you're probably aware). In any case, cows digest the [cellulose]( URL_0 ) of plants. Cellulose is made up of long strings of [sugar]( URL_2 ), and their stomachs actually break it down into these sugar molecules. Cows [ruminate]( URL_1 ), they use bacteria to ferment the hay and decompose it, they regurgitate it back to their mouths to chew on some more, etc... Think of it as \"cooking it\" in their stomachs, and re-tasting it as it changes from \"grass\" to \"fermented sugary slurpee\". And you never get tired of ice-cream (or other similar sweets), don't kid yourself. You would eat that day after day, if you could. So if the hay tastes like sweet ice-cream to the cows... they won't get tired of it.",
"Cows also gets picky like kids, like if you don't mix enough of cow food in hay, some of them will not eat altogether or just eat the cow food chunks and leave the hay behind. It's just that they don't know the good stuff also exist, but if they know it, they will surely ask for it.",
"Animals do get excited when you feed them novel or extra 'tasty' treats. This is most obvious with dogs at home. You also see it with domesticated animals like horses and sugar cubes or different types of feed or hay. Wild animals also do out of their way to get foods they prefer. I saw something like this when I was on a monkey encounter and spider monkeys would sift through my hand full of trail mix and throw away the almonds and take the cranberries. I even see it when I spray fresh water into a canal in the Florida Keys and the manatees all come up with their mouths open. I would think it is mostly a product of animals just not having the tools to complain about eating the same things all the time.",
"Maybe they think that’s the only food that exists, in their world so they eat what they can as the only option",
"It varies by animal. Koala bears only eat eucalyptus leaves they cannot eat anything else. Cows eat grass and other plants - to us it looks like they just eat grass but they eat other plants that grow in the grass if available. Most herbivores evolved to eat a limited type of plants. Digesting grass requires a special digestive system. Eating twigs and leaves requires a special type of mouth to bite through the harder material and chew it. So herbivores eat a very limited diet because that is what they can eat. Most predatory animals eat a limited diet because that is what is in their area and they can catch and eat. Bats eat insects because they cannot catch and eat larger prey. Humans are omnivores. We can eat a large variety of things. But because we have a generalized digestive system we also cannot get all of the nutrients we need from a limited diet - so we need to eat a large variety of things. We like crunch things because they tend to contain iron. We like sweet things because they tend to contain vitamin C and other vitamins. So we seek out a variety of foods to meet our dietary needs.",
"My cat can be very picky. We feed her a raw food diet, and there are animals she will straight up not eat: mutton and cavies. This cat was eating almost exclusively kibble as of 1.5 years ago. Very picky kitty. The above is to say, animals can certainly be picky if options are available."
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n6dgvj | How do nasa know about what's inside the sun(like the layers) and how hot the sun actually is when the closet they have ever been to the sun is 3.8 million miles away. | Like the title says how do nasa know about what's inside the sun(like the layers) and how hot the sun actually is when the closet they have ever been to the sun is 3.8 million miles away. Even if they can estimated the heat it would be way off and what could see through the sun surface for them to be able to tell what's inside it. And another question: how can they tell the age of the sun? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"When you put energy into an atom, this \"excites\" the electrons and causes them to jump around. When they do so, they emit photons. The specific kinds of photons an atom will emit depends on its electron configuration which is unique for that atom. So by energizing atoms we can cause it to emit a kind of photonic \"fingerprint.\" The sun, being a giant ball of energy, gives us lots of light to example, and by looking at that light, we can determine what combinations of atoms, and their proportions that would be required to give us light of that frequency. This only really tells us about the outer later of the sun though. But we can learn about its interior much in the same way we learn about the Earth's interior: through seismology. How vibrations pass through an object depends on that objects density and when a vibration wave passes through different substances with difference densities, it deflects and absorbs vibrational waves in noticeable ways. By examining how vibrations pass through the sun we can determine if its interior is divided into layers of different densities, how different those densities are, how thick those layers are, etc. We can also use the light to determine the temperature of the sun as well. The specific colors the sun emits and their specific intensities can be used to calculate its temperature. Dating the sun, however, is more of an indirect process. 1. The oldest objects we have been able to date in our solar system are around 4.5 billion years old. If the sun was older than this, why can't we find anything else older than this? If the sun was younger than this, how could the solar system predate the sun? 2. By viewing lots and lots of stars that are in various stages of their life we can create a map of how stars age, see where the sun is on that map, and then use that to measure it. For example, instead of watching a single person age from birth to death to determine the life span of humans, you take a snap shot of every human on Earth, then sort them by how old they look, and see where your target human falls in that sorting."
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n6djys | What does "Buy the rumor sell the news" mean? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gx6fob5",
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"text": [
"In the world of speculative investment, stock prices often rally on hype well before any actual news releases. To make the best returns, you buy when the hype is building and sell before the news that everyone expects actually drops. Since everyone expected the news, when they finally get it there’s often lackluster price movement. This has been quite pronounced in the market this year - companies beat their earnings estimates and then the stock price tanks because overhyped “investors” were already assuming even greater blowout earnings.",
"So, when dealing with company stocks, the conventional wisdom says that companies that are doing well will have their stock price increase according to how well they did. Investors and banks have all sorts of tools to tell them what they think the stock price should be based upon performance, etc. etc. But, you, as an investor, don't want to buy the stock after it's already gone up. You want to buy it while it's lower, and then sell once the earnings report comes out showing how well the company did. But since the earnings reports are secret until their release, you've got to do a little fortune telling. So, you buy the stock on the rumors that the performance is good, or more accurately, that the performance is better than people's guesses. Once the earnings are announced, and large investors/banks start trying to acquire the stock at or below the value they've calculated, then you sell your stock, assuming you had guessed the performance correctly. That's what they're referring to by \"Buy the rumor, Sell the news.\""
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n6dn7t | Why is the economic middle class shrinking? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gx6gm7g",
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"text": [
"Because the rich and ultra rich are getting richer. That money has to come from somewhere. For every million whatevers more your rich CEO is earning, that could have paid 10 people 100k, or 100 people 10k more. Its compounded by taxes-taxes over the past thirty/forty years have plummeted for the rich. So governments either have to raise taxes for the middle class or the poor, cut services, or both. Then you also have to factor in the circular economy. If you give a poor person 10 whatevers, they're more likely to spend it in the local community because they need to buy food. Which helps pay the shopkeeper, the accountant, the taxes for the schoolteacher, etc. A rich person would hoarde most of their money because that's a wiser investment for them. But that doesn't help the local economy.",
"Concentrating wealth is what a capitalist economic system is set up to do. Imagine you're Jeff Bezos. You have one high level goal in running Amazon - make money for yourself, and make money for your shareholders. You can accomplish that goal in two ways, sell more things and reduce your expenses. You're probably already selling as much as you can, so the easiest way to have the lowest possible expenses is to pay your employees as little as you can get away with. Most of the rest of the economy is run by other Bezoses who have more or less the same goals - workers are, as a result, forced to work for less than the value of their labour because there's a lack of better options. Theres a snowball effect that takes place here - the bigger Amazon gets, the more money and influence you have and the more you're able to accept risks and expand your company - big companies have an easier time getting even bigger than smaller ones. You're also more able to influence government policy by lobbying or threatening to move jobs abroad if, say, minimum wage or tax rates were to increase. As more and more of the economy is absorbed by these massive corporations smaller businesses where individuals or small groups of employees have bargaining power fall by the wayside. A single worker at your company has no ability to demand a better wage since they can easily be fired and replaced by an even more desperate person who needs the wage to live. To put it as simply as possible, those middle class jobs have begun to disappear because it's more profitable to pay your employees less. The less of those jobs there are the more people are forced to work lower paying jobs out of desperation, and as more people work in these jobs at or below the poverty line they become less able to have any influence on this system as they have no time to politically organize when they're working two jobs and no bargaining power when they're easily replaceable. Wealth being highly concentrated in the hands of a few people is the only expected outcome of a system that prioritizes profit margins above all else, and that system is self reinforcing.",
"Globalization. First world workers including the professional class must compete with much cheaper workers in the second and third world. The middle class has grown a ton in many places."
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n6em1i | How did scientist find out about the planets in our solar system? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most of the planets in our solar system were actually discovered hundreds of years ago because they can be seen with the naked eye. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn can all be seen just by looking up at the stars and seeing which ones move. Our word planet actually comes from greek, meaning wanderer, because planets look like stars that change positions. The other two planets, Uranus and Neptune, were discovered by optical telescopes. There a lot of math you can do to figure out where these planets are by observing gravitational effects, but it really boils down to just watching the sky through a telescope. Astronomy is mostly just picking out a section of sky and recording everything you see for days on end. If something moves, then you've potentially found a new planet, asteroid, comet, or dwarf planet. Hundreds of years of these observations from all over the world has resulted in us cataloging thousands upon thousands of items in our own solar system."
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n6fgmx | Why is a wound so itchy when it's about to fully heal? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A lot of reasons, like your nerves recovering and final layers of skin growing back, along with inflammation (the real answer).",
"Your body releases a substance called histamine, which triggers the cell movement necessary for producing new tissue, which then closes the wound. Histamine is what triggers the “itch” sensation."
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n6g4ve | How do sport events for disabled athletes make sure that everyone has equal disadvantages? | I was watching a swimming final in the Paralympic games and the athletes have all sorts of disabilities. Missing arms, unable to walk, almost no limbs at all. This got me wondering: How do the organizers can make sure that the disability of one is as much of a handicap as the disability of the others? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's not really the concern, or you'd have things like \"the Paraplegic 100 meter swim\" and the \"Basketball for people missing their left leg below the knee\". As you point out, everyone is different and so is every disability. Equality is not the goal, but rather equity. That is, we're not trying to make everyone the same, but rather to give everyone the opportunity to be the best that they can be in whichever event they participate in.",
"I competed in paracycling about 10 years ago. You sign up for the event you think you belong in. Then when going to your first event, you get classified. There will be somebody from the sports organization who tests you and makes sure your stated disability matches what you said it did, otherwise you get moved into a different category. Once you've been classified a few times, your classification become permanent, unless your situation changes or you need to be reclassified for some other reason. At smaller events, there aren't enough people to have full events per classification, so you compete against the standard. For each event there will be given a standard speed for each classification, whoever is the best percent faster than the standard wins. Only once you get to bigger events a paralympics do you have enough people that you can have races where fastest time wins. You can see all the different classifications for paracycling here: URL_0",
"Well theyre all the best of the best so the very fact theyre there at all, shows that they can compete with the others. No sporting event has equally match teams. Some teams are better others worse.",
"It differs in each case of course. For things like the Paralympics they have different types of disabilities in different competitions. So you might have the 100m dash for people missing arms but no 100m dash for people missing a leg, instead you might have the 400m dash for those. This means that there are a similar number of events as the Olympics but more athletes and always at least one competition an athlete can compete in. In some competitions it is possible to enforce disabilities. Wheelchair events is one example of this where people with various different type of leg disabilities can take part as long as they tie their legs to the chair. So it is possible for someone to win a wheelchair event and then walk to the top of the podium, this may be due to reduced mobility. Blind events is similarly possible to enforce using blindfolds. Most blind people do actually see a tiny so this could potentially give them some advantage making the blindfolds a requirement to level the playing field."
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n6g89y | What is flight response trauma, and flight response anxiety? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are four main responses to danger in living things: fight, flight, freeze and fawn. Kids who have traumatic upbringings tend to figure out fast which of these is going to work most often in their environment. So if you had a traumatic upbringing, whichever of these consistently worked for you in childhood has the potential to get \"stuck\" as a core way that you interact with the world. The flight response is simple, it's an urge to get away from the stressor. If flight consistently worked for you in childhood, then in adulthood, that might manifest as things like leaving relationships or workplaces as soon as there's an issue, never addressing growing problems, or jittery energy that keeps you compulsively doing things all day with an inability to relax. I'm recalling this off the top of my head from Pete Walker's book on Complex PTSD so if you want a deep dive, do check that out."
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n6gkni | Can soil erosion one day completely finish the fertile soil available on our planet? | As soil erosion occurs, we move on in search of more soil to suck nutrients from. So, will this practice one day eat away all the available stock of fertile soil on Earth? (Is that a possibility at least in theory?) | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If the farmer does nothing to rejuvenate the nutrients in the soil, often done via crop rotation, which is planting crops that add necessary nutrients to the soil as they grow and when they are tilled in, rather than planting a crop for harvest. Or even leaving the fields fallow (letting whatever native species grow, rather than planting a crop) for a few seasons can help rejuvenate the soil. But if industrial monocrop farming carries on unabated without using these techniques (and others) then yes, the soil will eventually be drained of nutrients and unable to bear harvestable crops.",
"We are combating this as well as we can. For most minerals this is not a problem at all. Either there is a huge abundance of minerals in the Earths crust so we will be able to supply the agriculture with fertilizer for thousands of years or in the case of nitrates we are able to synthesize it from the air. There is however a few minerals that might pose an issue in the future. One of them is phosphorus which is the second most important plant fertilizer. There is a couple of phosphorus mines in the world but they will likely run out in less then a hundred years and we do not know of any other sources. Another is cobalt which is used in animal feed as it is required to produce vitamin B12. Currently most of the cobalt comes from Congo with only a few other small deposits in the rest of the world. And most of the cobalt is currently used for lithium ion battery production for electric cars."
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n6haip | - Why is it bad to throw fruit/veggies into the woods if they don’t grow there naturally? | I recently went camping with some friends and when we cleaned up I tossed some grapes and oranges into the trees because I just figured some animals would eat them, and my friend told me I shouldn’t do that. He didn’t know why, he just knew you’re not supposed to lol | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If they have seeds in them, they will grow and could become a pest. If you are in a set camping ground, and everyone does it you will attract animals to the camp because there is a good source of food constantly. You should leave absolutely nothing behind from your stay, so that it is nice for the next person.",
"In addition to the other very good answers here, some foods are toxic to different sorts of animals and especially if they're non-native, they may or may not know not to eat it. The grapes as an example - they're extremely toxic to dogs. Imagine if someone was walking their dog through the woods later and their dog found the ones you tossed and ate them - they could get very sick and possibly die. Same likely goes for wild wolves. Is it at all LIKELY? No. But it's best for both food and non-food items to just take out what you bring in, for a wide range of reasons.",
"some introduced species(plants in this case) are better at getting things like water or nutrients than the plants that already live there. If the plants that are from there are destroyed by the new plant, it means that there is too much of one plant. some animals may lose food sources, researchers can't analyze the plant, and the whole area can get sick easier, wiping out vegetation and leaving the area barren. also you dont want bears",
"Your friend is overreacting, though it is a fair point to say that throwing food away in a camping area could attract bears or other unwanted animals."
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n6i0jl | How exactly does a countries' increasing fiscal debt result in a deterioration in quality of life? | It seems that everyone is worried about the fiscal debt of their countries. They say things like, "our children will have to pay for this!" But how? I know a countries' federal bank will purchase government bonds/treasury notes thereby driving the country into debt. But then how does that translate to a poorer quality of life for the average individual? The government can raises taxes as a contractionary fiscal policy but that cannot possibly be enough to run a country plus pay off the debt owed. It seems like most modern western countries have always been in debt since their creation and I am aware of recessions, and depressions but these occurrences also seem to be the natural eb and flow of these countries. And the debt amount just seems to increase and increase. Can someone break down the step by step of how a countries' fiscal debt actually deteriorates the quality of life of the average individual living in a debt ridden country? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Idk, people only seem to complain about government debt when they disagree with the priorities of the party proposing the spending. Stimulating the economy by giving inmense tax breaks to Fortune 500 companies or stimulating the economy by giving direct payments to the citizenry... Same impact on debt, but different political parties will scream based on their priority. Like the Hoover Dam. That was an infrastructure investment. It was paid off in the late 80s I think. 50 yrs of debt. Don't remember my parents celebrating that it was paid off because it made no difference in their life."
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n6i82h | How can MRI machines change how a new tattoo looks? | I was scheduling and MRI and they asked if I had any tattoos or piercings that were new. I do in fact have a roughly 2 month old tattoo. The person scheduling me talked to one of the radiologists and said that MRIs can change the way new (up to 3-4 month old) tattoos look. How is that possible / how does that even work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The ink can sometimes contain trace amounts of iron that will be greatly affected by the magnetic field generated by an mri",
"I've never quite heard that before. But live with an MRI researcher and why they typically ask is: Older tattoos in particular use inks that contain metals that are magnetic. If you have one of those tattoos they can heat up the pigment in the tattoo and give you severe burns. It also ruins the image of the scan too. It heats up the pigment by basically exciting, what I think in many cases is ironoxide, the molecules as it creates the magnetic field which allows for the scan. I'm not saying that I know better about new tattoos, technology and changes--but this is traditionally why its asked about. Edit: Here is a case study example which talks about it URL_0",
"As others said, if the tattoo ink has any trace amounts of iron, the extremely strong magnetic field could affect it. It is hard to express how strong the magnetic fields are around an MRI, so here is [an example of a floor buffer that was pulled into an MRI machine]( URL_0 ).",
"The ink in the tatoo contains iron, as other people mentioned. I will add it's not just the magnetic field, but the rapidly changing field, and the flow of current elicited by these fields can heat up the tattoo, and move around the particles within the ink. In rare cases it can also heat up and cause some inflammation. Your MRI tech and radiologist will know what to do, so don't let that prevent you from getting a scan. If your Dr. tells you that you need an MRI and it's safe, then just do an MRI. They probably have a good reason to request that since it's an expensive scan."
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n6ipus | How high level athletes prevent their joints from deterioration with so much impact suffered everyday? | Just watched some basketball and parkour videos and I was wondering how their bodies can handle it | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"TLDR: they can’t. Your body exists kind of in a bell curve. Too little exercise = your joints degrade. Too much = your joints wear out. The athletes you watched are in the top end of that bell curve. They have a limited window before they have to stop, because their bodies can’t do that forever.",
"Additional question: as im aging im sore anyways. Should i just start running because i will be in pain either way and exercise overall is better for heart etc? I still find it hard to define when it’s “too much”, how do people know that?!",
"I'm a month out of turning 55. I played football from 3rd-12th grade. I was a street skateboarder through my mid-30s, switched to street BMX into my 40s and finally switched over to only surfing from 42 to now. I'm still standing, but my knees have little-to-no cartilage left, my hips are all whack, and have recurring issues with bulging discs. The top comment is correct, even for those of us who are not top athletes. Bodies operate the same. Too little? You deteriorate. Too much? You rapidly deteriorate. The latter is much more fun...trust me.",
"An orthopedic surgeon doctor recently told me that people who are able to remain athletic in late-life aren't that way because they've just maintained healthy habits, it's because \"they won the genetic lottery\". In other words, everyone can abuse their bodies while they're young, but only some people's bodies are resilient enough to keep working well afterwards.",
"A lot of these things. They definitely suffer deterioration and injury. And whereas you or I might tweak a knee and lay up for a week or three, they play through the pain or are given a ton of pain medication to play. (In addition to top-of-the line therapies, no doubt. Sports medicine has some miracles when it comes to a million-dollar athlete that simply aren't considered when Regular Joe tears a meniscus. But pushing your body through pain might still a part of it, whether it's accelerating through rehab or putting off the surgery to finish the season.)",
"Training. And with that technique and muscle build up. Technique will cause a softer impact and the muscles act a spring or cushion. Dispersing the remaining energy from the impact. But still. Professional athletes suffer from a deteriorating body at the end of their career.",
"They absolutely do take damage over time. Even people who just played certain sports in high school/college often have lasting effects, ranging from mild to debilitating. Many pro athletes' careers end due to injuries or gradual damage - and that's *with* access to the best trainers and physical therapists.",
"They eat well. They train. Then they age just like the rest of us. WE all float down here.",
"Well, they don't. All that stuff catches up with them in the end and they are more likely to develop joint problems later in life.",
"Surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, steroids. Most people think of gigantic muscular guys like Barry Bonds when they think of steroids, but tons of athletes use it not necessarily to get huge and gain muscle, but rather to speed up their body's recovery.",
"The average career length of professional athletes are shockingly short. Sure there are exemptions to the rule, but very few manage to stay on top for more than a couple of years and what nobody sees are the pain they have to endure the rest of their lives.",
"Many have the best training, nutrition, sports medicine docs, PEDs, and they’re still destroyed when they retire.",
"Lol. The fact that none of the top comments talk about drugs is a testament to how ignorant the people giving answers are. The answer you're looking for is a cocktail of HGH, Test, and a mileu of other compounds.",
"I know the Paleo guy Mark Sisson, who used to do a lot of marathons and triathlons, has said that many of his former co - competitors have had hip and knee replacement surgeries. He advocates exercise that causes much less repetitive stress for that reason."
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n6ja5q | how gaseous are gas planets? | I learned growing up that gas giants like Saturn and Jupiter are mostly gas. What does that mean exactly? Do they have a ground/crust or is it just gas all the way through? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We don't know for certain, but basically it starts out as a thin gas at the \"surface\", and as you go deeper, it becomes thicker, and if you go deep enough, there's so much pressure from gravity it condenses into a liquid. So there's an ocean of hydrogen down there somewhere. It's speculated that there *might* be a small rocky core, but it's mostly just gas: about 90% hydrogen and 10% helium with a tiny amount of other stuff mixed in."
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n6jbje | Why cant we literally pump dopamine? | So... the question is that since dopamine and other hormons seem to be know for and tied to different mental states why cant we make a pill or other sort of extra input of what seem to be missing? Yes, that was one sentence. Yes, I am hoping it makes sense. No, I am not sure if I can figure it out by myself. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So, there actually are literal [dopamine pumps]( URL_0 ) that are used for Parkinson's disease. Epinephrine (also called adrenaline) is a very important neurotransmitter, and that's also what's in EpiPens. But this doesn't always work for a few reasons. First, a lot of those chemicals can't easily get from our blood into our brain tissue (or vice versa) since there's a protective barrier. Even the dopamine pump above uses a modified version of dopamine that can, but we can't always do that well. Second, when you dump a bunch of hormones or chemicals on the body the body reacts by making less of that hormone itself to try to keep itself in balance. This can sometimes cause serious side effects. Third, very very few problems in the brain are due to a simple issue of \"not enough of a single chemical\" (even Parkinson's, which is basically caused by the brain not being able to make dopamine anymore, is more complicated) You don't water plants in your house with a fire hose because the water that's really good for the plants isn't so great for your computer on the desk next to them. Most of the drugs we have tend to be a bit more specific in terms of where they have their effect.",
"Your brain has little things that function sort of like a gateway that are called \"dopamine re-uptake inhibitors\" which regulate the amount of dopamine your brain uses at a time. The only way to cause your brain to allow more dopamine to be used in one sitting is if you have a chemical that specifically targets the D.R.I. and forces the gate to stay open, for example, THC in marijuana."
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n6jfc0 | If inbreeding causes a lack of genetics, how is there such genetic diversity? | How is there such genetic diversity now if inbreeding causes a lack of it? How did that not happen when there wasn’t a lot of animals on the planet? Or was it that there were a lot of land animals by the time that was an issue to not have to worry about it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Genetic diversity happens through random mutation in DNA. Some mutations are good, some are bad, and most are neutral. These mutations build up over generations, leading to genetic diversity. Of the mutations that are bad, many are what's called \"recessive.\" That means you need to get two bad copies of the gene to get the bad trait. If your parents are very genetically distinct, it is unlikely that both will be able to give you the same bad mutation. If your parents are closely related, they are more likely to give you the same \"bad\" gene.",
"Inbreeding damage is random. And rare. If siblings mate, there's still a HUGE chance for differences. Every generation afterward has those same chances for diversity. Genetic fault is only like 1%",
"Humaniods have been around about 300k years. Meaning, even if we started from 1 couple, and even with inbreeding happened for quite few generations, mathematically, after about 100 generations, we should be so far removed from the original source that there would be enough differences within our species, that we would not technically be inbreeding anymore. And not to mention that people separate and move around. Our genes compensate for new environmental situations that they change (survival of the fittest)",
"We can look back at history and say the 1st human appeared this long ago, and the 1st spider appeared this long ago, but the reality of it is that the 1st of anything is virtually indistinguishable from it's parents, it's grandparents, or the thousands of others of it's species. Evolution can take place very quickly on a geological time scale, but is very slow on a biological time scale. Since the dawn of sexual reproduction, having a lack of diversity in sexual partners is usually only a problem when a species is threatened with extinction, or when a group becomes isolated."
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n6ka99 | When and why does a company require a board of directors? How come it can sometimes overrule or even push out the owner? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A board of directors is usually found at a public company. The board is elected by the shareholders (the owners) to run the company on their behalf and look out for their interests. Usually, the board then hires the executives who actually run the company per the board's instructions. The board works for the owners. However, in lots of cases, \"the owner\" is one of the original owners from before the company went public and they still own a lot of shares. But if they don't own a majority (very common with large public companies) then the other owners (the rest of the shareholders) have enough votes to push a particular person \\*off the board\\* or \\*out of working at the company\\*. And since the board represents the \\*majority\\* of the shareholders, minority owners may not always get their way. If the majority of shareholders decide to sell the company, then the minority can be \"forced out\". They will still get whatever they're due from the sale but they may not be able to stop the sale.",
"A corporation with a board of directors usually doesn't have one owner, but many owners. Publicly traded companies, like Apple or Microsoft, has many owners, anyone who owns a share is a partial owner. So even if Bill Gates or Steve Jobs were the founders, they are no longer the sole or even primary owners of the company. The board exists to represent the shareholders, and thus owners of the company, to ensure that the company operates in the best interest of the shareholders.",
"When a corporation starts selling shares. The Board of Directors is who shareholders vote for as a part of their partial ownership of the company. As far as pushing out the owner of a company, it doesn't mean the person no longer owns the company. They will still get their share of the profits. The shareholders just don't want them running the company. They think the company will be more profitable (and therefore the stock price will go up, making them more money) with someone else. The owner can fight that measure if they own the majority of shares in the company, but if the shareholders don't want the owner there, and the owner is fighting them, that may cause shares to be sold, lowering the value of the stock, which hurts everyone.",
"You can imagine a publicly-traded company like a government: it has citizens (shareholders) a legislature/parliament/congress (board) and a head of government/president (CEO.) The board exists for the same reason a legislature does: there are too many citizens to get in a room to learn about and decide everything, so they elect representatives who do it on their behalf. The main difference is that, in government, each citizen's vote is equal, but in a corporation, shareholders get one vote for each share of stock, so shareholders with more shares can outvote others. A board can never fire the owner**s**, because the board works *for* the owners -- the shareholders together are the owners. But they can fire the founder of the company if the founder no longer owns enough of the company's stock to control the board."
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n6khbu | Why does metal spoon taste weird after touching aluminium foil? | I always cringe and unable to eat with that spoon due to the taste and sensation after it touches aluminium foil. Why is this? Thank you! | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Galvanic reaction. I am very sensitive to this as well. Essentially, electrons are transferring from the aluminum to the steel. Here's an explainer URL_0"
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n6o9fl | Why do earthworms appear in big numbers on sidewalks when it is raining, and why are they not there when it is not raining? | Today was a rainy day, and I saw plenty of earthworms which I rarely see otherwise. This is why I was asking this myself. I also do not see any advantage of earthworms to be on the sidewalks. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Some will say that the water soaks into the soil and makes it hard for them to breathe, but the more likely reason is that earthworms don't usually move about on the surface because it's so dry that THAT makes it hard for them to breathe. Worms breathe through their skin and need that skin to be moist. It's easier to move around on the surface than underground, but usually the surface is too dry, so when it rains they can take that opportunity to move around easier and not dry out.",
"They cannot move on the sidewalks when they are dry, they need moisture. When it rains they are able to move across the sidewalk since its wet.",
"You’ll want to watch [Wild Kratts and The Mystery of Squirmy Wormy]( URL_0 ). Basically~~ the ground and their tunnels fill with too much water~~ because they can since it’s the only time it’s really “safe” and they can get to one place to another quickly. If you’re fishing, you can stab a stick into the ground and wack it with the other stick to make it simulate rain.",
"The question has been answered but I wanted to add something: [sea gulls can be seen to tapdance]( URL_0 ) (quickly hop from one foot to another) to make worms think it is raining. (they generate vibrations that the worms can feel). This lures them up so the gull can get at them."
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n6p28k | What does the ‘abort’ handle in spacecraft cockpits actually do? | In many movies and media that depict real-life spacecraft, or near-future spacecraft that are logical progressions of real-life spacecraft, they show the abort handle or button or switch. What would happen in real-life if this handle was pulled during any given moment during space flight; takeoff, orbit, halfway to the moon, etc.? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The classic \"abort handle\" is for the launch abort, which obviously only works while you're still connected to your carrier rocket. In that case, it activates a dedicated launch abort rocket and separates the spacecraft from the rocket. The small, but powerful abort rocket then pulls away the spacecraft from the rocket (and the imminent explosion which is usually the cause to use it). Then it usually activates the descent systems (e.g. attitude control so you're right side up, and parachutes once you reach the correct altitude for them. Couple videos from those systems in use: [Soyuz pad abort]( URL_0 ) [Soyuz in-flight abort]( URL_4 ) (these 2 were real accidents with people on board!) [Crew Dragon pad abort test]( URL_2 ) [Crew Dragon in-flight abort test]( URL_3 ) [Apollo abort test]( URL_1 ) However, the handle isn't the only way the abort can be activated, and it's more likely that it's activated by the flight computer sensing a failure.",
"It usually activates the escape rocket, which blasts the crew capsule away from the rocket. It is only usable for a certain window of the launch and then the escape rocket is jettisoned. It's not available after that. There's a different mechanism to blow exploding bolts on the hatch so the crew can get out quickly if the vehicle is still on the pad, then they get into a little cable cart that whips them away from the rocket. These are two completely separate systems with different specific windows of use. It's not like the ejector seat in a fighter plane that can be activated at any time. Once you're in space, just hope for the best. If still in orbit, an emergency re-entry may be possible, but there's a whole process for that and it takes a while. You can't just skedaddle back home all of a sudden.",
"It really depends on the space craft. In the case of Apollo and the Falcon 9 hitting the abort during launch fires explosive bolts and emergency thrusters that will kick the spacecraft away from the rocket. Which allows it to land safely. Now the abort button on say the lunar module if pressed would fire the accent stage thruster forcing the decent stage away from the accent stage allowing the lunar module to reach lunar orbit. There is really no abort during the trip to the moon. If a spacecraft has to return like Apollo 13 did you have to change the craft delta v to basically slingshot around the moon.",
"The abort modes are only used during launch. If there's an emergency with the spacecraft on the launch pad or in flight that requires the capsule to come back to Earth immediately or if there's something wrong with the booster, the abort handle or button will fire emergency rockets on the capsule that will pull it safely away from the booster. [You can see in this animation how that works]( URL_0 ). Because the spacecraft is not yet in orbit, the capsule will then coast for a bit and then deploy its parachutes for a safe landing. In some rockets, like the Russian Soyuz, the abort rockets can be jettisoned after launch. In others, like the SpaceX Dragon, the emergency escape rockets are built into the capsule. Typically though, the onboard computer will detect an emergency and activate the abort rockets automatically. The button or handle is more of a backup in case something happens that the computer doesn't detect or if the computer doesn't react fast enough."
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n6phrf | How do allergy shots (which contain allergens) stop the allergies, but you would still be allergic to those allergens, despite being exposed to them for years naturally? | Allergy shots contain the allergens one is allergic to. Which somehow causes you to build up an immunity to the allergen. But alot of the stuff you'd be allergic to, is all year round. So how is it, that constantly being exposed to these allergens naturally, not causes you to not develop an immunity to them? So I suppose im asking, what's the difference between taking allergy shots, and being exposed to the allergens naturally? Seems like the exact same thing to me. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It’s less about immunity and more about desensitization. Immunity from my understanding is creating something in your body to protect you, like creating antibodies. Immunotherapy doesn’t create anything. It’s not creating antibodies. It’s just desensitizing you. Allergens in nature are large enough to easily trigger you. But immunotherapy uses a little bit of allergen at the time, and your body doesn’t see that small amount as much of a threat, so as you keep doing it, your body recognizes it as something commonly seen and normalized. Similar idea to if you saw an elf walk into your bar it’d be weird the first time but if they kept showing up you’d be chill with them fast, but if a horde of elves showed up to your bar you’d panic fast",
"It's the degree of exposure. An analogy would be, allergens are like people and your body is like a minefield, waiting to just explode. When you're exposed to them in a large amount, all the mines explode simultaneously and you get massive amount of destruction. That leads to you getting symptoms. Runny nose, cough, breathing problem. When you take allergen shot, it's a small amount of allergen. That allergen only triggers a few mines at a time. They're so few you don't feel the symptoms as much. But they're still exploding. And when you're exposed to it in nature, it won't affect you as much since your mines are all exploded.",
"It's all about the different kinds of antibodies the body produces to defend itself against invaders. They are the immunoglobulins, Ig for short. When you get a vaccine the intent is to expose you to a bit of the agent of disease to cause your body to produce gamma globulin antibodies, IgG for short. This neat trick wiped out small pox. It is the means of our lifelong immunity to \"childhood illnesses\" after just one bout with the \"germs\" that are the causative agent. Gamma globulins collected from animal or human survivors of a disease are used to protect someone recently exposed from getting sick. This is the usual means of treating victims of exposure to the Hepatitis A virus Mother's milk contains antibodies of the IgA class, they provide temporary immunity to the things Mom has been exposed to to the nursing infant. There is a branch of our immune system that is directed at parasites that doesn't get nearly the workout that it once did in our modern highly sanitized and urbanized world. Immunity to parasites is mediated by antibodies of the IgE class. These don't directly attack an invader the way the IgG antibodies do, they signal the tissue being invaded by a parasite to become inflamed and go on the attack. Histamine is released to increase blood flow, and guide the movement of immune cells into the region. That is the heart of the problem with allergies. You get pollen grains in your eyes and up your nose and the body produces IgA antibodies against the offending substances, itchy red eyes, runny nose and all of the other joys of allergy season follow. The allergy shots are *injected* so that they expose the blood stream to the offenders to encourage the production of IgG mediated immunity that does not cause the tissue inflammation. It is not so much a matter of \"desensitization\" to an allergen but a shift in the way the body deals with the onslaught of the offending substances. You'll continue battle with *and win* over the invading allergens, you just do it in a way keeps the victories quiet and avoids the symptoms of allergies.",
"A lot of sensitive systems react weirdly to stuff in ~~large~~ small amounts. Consider a massage therapist who is trained to use firm pressure to help people relax. Light pressure can feel tickly. That tickly sensarion is your nervous system freaking out because it’s not sure what is going on. Why would it freak out? Well, consider two scenarios: one where you’re playing a song and you can hear it just fine, and another where you hear just little quiet fragments of maybe music and they’re at the edge of your perception. What do you do in that second case? You crank up the volume to see if you can hear. When there is a clear detection, there’s no amplification of the input/detection signal. But if there’s a maybe detection, a slight hint of triggering the sensors, the system will amplify its input (edit: gain is a better word) to attempt to resolve whether there’s something to detect. Our bodies’ immune response works in a similar way. If there’s a shit ton of something coming in, your body learns to deal with it. But if there’s a tiny amount, it’s never really sure if its response is working so it keeps cranking up the response just in case the response so far wasn’t enough."
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n6r5pt | Can some clothes actually protect you more from the sun? Why are some clothes labeled as being SPF x? | Sometimes I see that some clothes, usually workout type clothes, are advertised as being a certain SPF. Why? This seems very gimmicky to me since I never get burned where any type of clothing is covering me, even just a plain cotton T-shirt in very harsh sun conditions. I’m very white and burn easily for more context. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Clothes should actually be rated at a UPF not an SPF and the numbers mean something a little different. A UPF of 50 means that only 1/50 of the UV radiation will pass through the fabric. The main advantage to this type of clothing is that it is able to be thinner, lighter, and more breathable than typical clothing with a similar ability to protect from the sun."
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n6rbrt | What exactly makes one's voice to change when they hit puberty? What's the process? What's the reason? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Under the influence of sex hormones, the voice box, or larynx, grows in both sexes. This growth is far more prominent in boys than in girls and is more easily perceived. It causes the voice to drop and deepen. Along with the larynx, the vocal folds (vocal cords) grow significantly longer and thicker. The facial bones begin to grow as well. Cavities in the sinuses, the nose, and the back of the throat grow bigger, thus creating more space within the head to allow the voice to resonate. URL_0"
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n6rzus | can internet providers listin in to the decryption key | So for explain if I send out a message on the app let’s say discord, I encrypt it locally, then send it out, but when starting a conversation both party’s of the conversation gets a decryption key, to decrypt the encrypted message is it possibly for internet provider to see the decryption key and thus decrypting my encrypted code I could be wrong so I apologize in advance Edit: thanks for explaining the use of public keys and private keys, I understand the concept now | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That is not how encryption works. Modern encryption works over a private and public key. The public one you share and with that people can encrypt messages to send to you. These encrypted messages can only be decrypted with the private key and only you have that one. So for a conversation you only send out both your public keys, while you both keep your private keys for yourself and just decrypt your incoming messages, without anyone else being able to do so.",
"It's depending on the encryption method, like pgp u got an private and public key, so everyone having your public key can send u an encrypted message but only u are able to decrypt it Widely used is tls/ssl it's working with handshakes, but yeah pgp was the easier to explain imo."
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n6sb7a | Why is streaming Netflix so bad for the environment? | I’ve seen a lot of articles across all the news outlets (aka papers/tv etc) very recently stating that streaming Netflix for an hour produces the same amount of emissions as driving a quarter of a mile but I really don’t understand why? Is it because of what you’re watching it on or is it the act of streaming itself that’s bad? Edit - I’m also assuming this applies to all streaming services and not just Netflix? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is not inherently bad for the environment if it were not for the fact that most of our power is generated from fossil fuels. Watching netflix, or streaming in general, uses a crapton of power (think multiple data centres for your lag free high res watching). Also because it \"needs\" to be available 24/7. In my opinion these studies are more aimed towards shifting blame. Rather than blame the fossil fuel based power generation it is shifting blame to the consumer \"watching netflix makes us burn more fossil fuels!\". Even if they could produce power by solar, wind or nuclear. Again this is just my opinion",
"To think about it more smartly, the question should always be, \"in comparison to what?\" If you decided to meditate in your room or go for a walk in the park, then sure the impact of Netflix streaming is higher than that. If the alternative is to drive to a movie theater and watch a movie, then the answer is Netflix is probably better. There is no such thing as \"no impact to the environment\", other than perhaps not living, which is not a serious statement. (Want to save the environment? Kill half the human population, job done!) What you can do is make reasonable choices among reasonable alternatives.",
"All of it , The video's your watching need to be stored somewhere that means a datacenter that consume's power being fed by most likely a coal plant. now thats just the primary copy of that data, there are also backups and hubs to distribute the load so that one server isnt trying to feed millions of streams at the same time. all of that takes power which again is probably being fed by the closest coal plant",
"It seems like these articles are worded in a way that makes it *sound* \"so\" bad. Note that if you drive at 30 miles per hour, a quarter of a mile is only 30 seconds of driving. So what they're saying is that driving is 120 times as bad as watching Netflix, or watching Netflix is 0.83% as bad as driving. When I put it that way, it doesn't seem \"so\" bad, just slightly worse than doing nothing at all. With that in mind I'm not sure what you want to know. Do you want to know why watching Netflix produces *any* emissions at all (i.e. why it's not 0% as bad as driving)?"
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n6spbj | Crypto is software, code. Isn't it hosted on a server somewhere on the world? Break the computer, break the crypto? | I don't understand how cyptocurrency can be forever. It's just code at the end of the day. That code must be run on a server somewhere right? Like all online games and data servers keep all digital data. Isn't cyptocurrency the same? If the server or computer dies, won't all the money just poof? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Crypto currency is a decentralized system. There is no \"central server\" that is running the whole scheme. If you're familiar with Peer-to-Peer games where you don't connect to a server but instead directly to the players you want to play with crypto functions in similar terms. Crypto is \"run\" by everyone who wants to run the code. If you imagine a network where your computer is connected to a few other computers, and those computers are connected to a few more, and those to a few more, that's kind of how crypto operates. Everyone who wants can store the blockchain. Your computer is constantly chatting to its neighbors to share information and try to keep up to date with what chain is the right one and who is doing what. Unless a significant portion of the computers who are running crypto go poof you can fairly consider the system functionally immortal. You only need a single computer online to run the entire blockchain, and there are a lot of computers currently online.",
"Breaking crypto would be like killing Voldemort. Except instead of 8 pieces to kill, there’s millions, and that number is increasing. Is it possible? Look, probably? Is it in any way feasible? I’d say not.",
"Here's my shot at explaining how Bitcoin works. A word of caution- this is a bit of a long read. Albert Einstein said, \"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler\". I've tried my best to do just that. Imagine that someone wants to give you some tokens in exchange for something of value that you provide them. How do you protect yourself from being cheated, how do you guarantee that those tokens will remain yours? With physical tokens like cash, metal, or gems, it's easy: it can only exist in one place at a time, so as long as you're holding onto it, it can't be anywhere else. But electronically? Things which exist only electronically can be trivially duplicated. So if someone is sending you a digital token online, how can you trust that you are now the only unique holder of it, and it isn't simultaneously being copied and sent to other places online? The traditional solution is to defer verification to a central authority, usually a bank. The bank keeps a ledger, a master database of who owns what. That person would notify their bank that they'd like to transfer some tokens to you, the bank would check their ledger, verify that they have it, then create a new entry into the ledger recording the transfer. If that person were to try and send the same tokens to someone else later, the bank would say no, you can't do that. This works well in protecting you from needing to trust the other person, but it introduces a third party into the transaction, the bank. A bank which needs to monitor and track what you have, always stands between you and the person you're sending tokens to, and who has the power to deny or even reverse transactions, freeze or seize tokens, and edit the ledger as it chooses. How can you create a ledger for a digital token which cannot be duplicated or counterfeited, which can only exist in one digital pocket at a time, which can be transferred from user to user freely but cannot be double-spent, where no single entity needs to be trusted with unilateral power over the books? What Nakamoto proposed is something called a Proof-Of-Work Blockchain. A blockchain is a special type of ledger maintained by a decentralized, trustless swarm of competing agents, which will nevertheless converge upon one single un-alterable consensus ledger of transactions because of the rules about how new entries to the ledger must be written. In 2008, Nakamoto published their paper, and in early 2009 they released the first public blockchain onto the internet, and the tokens of this blockchain are called Bitcoins. There are two key concepts you need to understand: 1. Hashing algorithms, and 2. Public-Private Keypairs. Let's go over them now. A hashing algorithm is a bundle of math which functions like a precise woodchipper. If you feed something in, it takes your input and shreds it into a string of digital static called a hash. If you feed the same thing in, you'll always get the same string out. If you change the input even a tiny bit, the hash that comes out will be completely different. And it's impossible to take a hash and use it to reconstruct the original input. A Public-Private keypair is a secure way to digitally prove your identity and ownership. The Public key can be disseminated widely, and the Private key is kept secret by the owner. The Private key can be used to prove that you're the owner of the Public key. Like any bank's ledger, the Blockchain is a database, a huge list of public wallet addresses (corresponding to public keys) along with data on how much bitcoin each one contains. It also contains the complete transaction history of every single transfer of bitcoin from one address to another since the blockchain was first created in 2009. This file is massive- over 300 gigabytes as of Jan 2021. Each new batch of transactions added to this database is called a block, and each block is built off the previous one like links in a chain. However, unlike the ledger of a bank, adding a new batch of transactions to the Blockchain ledger is an intentionally hard process, and the deliberately wasteful difficulty of doing so is the key to its security. Suppose you wanted to receive bitcoins from someone. You'd randomly generate a public-private keypair, and you'd give them the public key you just generated. They would have the private key for their wallet, which exists on the blockchain and is registered as having some amount of bitcoin, and they would use their private key to transmit a message, \"hey, wallet XYZ transfers 0.22524511 bitcoin to wallet ABC, here's proof that I'm the owner of XYZ. By the way, I'm including a tip of 0.00005000 bitcoin to the Miner who processes this\". This message goes to what is essentially a public noticeboard (called the mempool). Then, the Bitcoin Miners come in. Bitcoin Miners are the people (technically, the computer systems they set up) who monitor the mempool and are in constant competition to luck out and become the author of the next block. The reward for doing so is that, in addition to the tips collected from all transactions, each block written allows the author to declare the creation of a new public wallet address which has coins from nowhere, to which the miner holds the private key. A block might look like, The previous block was block #149 This is block #150 XYZ transfers 0.22524511 coins to ABC and 0.00005000 coins to MYN SRM transfers 15.4250000 coins to KJQ and 0.00004500 coins to MYN JOE transfers 0.00752000 coins to LEA and 0.00002200 coins to MYN The new address for this block is MY2, which now contains 50.00000000 coins End of Block #150 Zombie Pirate Party Monkey You might have 2 questions in mind right now: What's stopping a miner from just writing blocks as fast as they want and minting coins for themselves as fast as they'd like? What's the deal with the last part of that block? The answer to both questions are the same, and they're related to Hashing. If you take the entire block and shove it through a hashing algorithm, you'll discover that the hash which comes out looks extremely unusual. This is the hash for the real block #150 on the actual blockchain- 000000009ca75733b4cf527fe193b919201a2ed38c9e147a5665fdfade551f4d Notice something? The critical rule of Bitcoin mining, which stops miners from just writing as many blocks as they'd like as fast as they'd like, is this: the hash of each block must start with a certain amount of zeroes. In order to write this block, the miner first writes a draft: \"The previous block was #149, this is block #150, people sending coins to each other, tips go to my wallet which is here, and here's my new wallet with 50 coins I want to add to the blockchain\", and then they hash it. It probably won't start with the needed amount of zeroes. So they add a random bit to the end and hash it again. Still no. The miner will keep throwing different random bits into their draft block, billions of times per second until, by pure luck and brute force, they hit upon a random string which makes the block pass. \"Eureka! Here's Block #150!\" they announce, broadcasting the new block to other miners. The other miners, busy with their own billions of guesses per second, spare a single hash cycle checking out this #150, confirm that it checks out, drop their own personal drafts of #150, adds this #150 to their own personal copies of the blockchain and start working on block #151, hoping to write the next block themselves. As the miners spread word of the new block #150, you're satisfied to see that person's transaction now recorded onto this latest link of the blockchain. Think about what would need to happen if, thirty minutes later, the person who sent you those coins wanted to take it back, erase that record, and spend it elsewhere. They would have to write an alternate block #150, one that didn't include their transaction to you. In order to do that, they would have to make trillions of guesses themselves before they found a random string that would make it hash properly. Then, they'd have to write an alt-#151, alt-#152, and so on. Meanwhile, the majority of the miners have already published block #153 and are now working on block #154, and nobody would accept their alt-#150 because everyone is already racing to write #154. The only way for a bad actor to reverse and double-spend a transaction which has already been written would be to create an alternate chain longer than the dominant one, and doing that would require commanding more computer power than the rest of the network combined. Good luck. And that's how you create a digital token that can't be duplicated or counterfeited, can only exist in one place at a time, whose supply is finite, which can be sent freely from any address to any other, and is secured not by trusting a third-party authority, but by math. This is what Bitcoin is, and what it continues to be today. Built around this are the far more messy human questions of, what is it worth? How much are people willing to buy and sell it for today, and what price will they pay for it tomorrow? These questions and the rancid sewers of discussion around them are beyond the scope of this explanation. Bitcoin came into existence early in 2009, and at first it was largely just a curiosity and a plaything for cryptography nerds, computer scientists, and economic libertarians. It was a neat toy, but the question at the time was, \"Okay, it's cool, but does this stuff actually have any value at all?\" Eventually, on May 22, 2010, a Florida man paid another person 10,000 bitcoins for them to order him two Large pizzas from Dominos. With this, they became the first two people in history to believe that the answer to that question is: Yes, it does. So far, people have not stopped believing that yet.",
"Thank you for asking this. Reading all the replies really helped me understand a lot about Crypto.",
"Im no expert but im prettysure thats why u have a blockchain, like having 1000 bits of identical code all in different parts of the world and they would all have to break at the same time for it to make any changes in the actual code (research 51% attack)",
"Cryptocurrency isn't code. Bitcoin, to simplify, is a pair of numbers that can be found by guessing a random pair of numbers, then operating some lengthy mathematical operation on those numbers to detect a special property. When found, that number pair constitutes a unit of currency. One then reports that pair to the centralized servers which share that report. One number is kept private, the other shared. By virtue of the mathematical operation, strangers cannot guess your private number from the reported, public, number from the pair you've found. To exchange currency, you again perform some operation on your numbers that can only be done if somebody knows the secret portion of your number pair. The results of that operation are reported publicly which transfers the unit of currency to the other person. That exchange mechanism is called blockchain. Locating number pairs is called mining. Number pairs are bitcoins.",
"I have some pedantic complaining below. None of this is meant to take away from the other answers. Those answers are correct and should be read first. So thus far this thread has discussed how things work in theory, and I want to point out a few things that happen in practice that I feel people should know. So let's say Bob reads a news story about Bitcoin and wants to buy $100 of Bitcoin. Now while (as discussed in this thread) Bob could establish a crypto wallet on his physical machine, download some software, sync the blockchain, etc and buy the coin (or even mine the coin if it were computationally possible) - that's definitely not an easy thing to do for someone with a passing interest. Bob may have seen advertising from Paypal or Robinhood about being able to buy crypto on their platform. He buys $100 of Bitcoin on Robinhood. So, here's where the theory falls apart right now. Robinhood/PayPal don't actually give Bob access to his wallet or the ability to send the actual crypto to a different wallet. As far as we know, they could just be treating the crypto like an underlying security and never changing your money from USD. More importantly, I wanted to point out that there is more and more \"re-centralization\" happening in the sense that Bob is now trusting a giant entity like Robinhood/PayPal to maintain and verify transactions to the blockchain. There's nothing stopping them from faking transactions they never actually put on the blockchain. There's nothing stopping them from messing with price discovery. There is certainly nothing stopping them from tying your transaction to your personally identifying info. Starting to look no different then banking in USD.",
"The word here is decentralized, it is hosted on multiple servers and they agree on each other. The multiple hosters are miners here, inorder to mine the transaction they need to know the full history of the transactions (Sometimes minified versions using hash). It is estimated around 1,000,000 individual miners (servers as they have full knowledge about the transaction). So unless 51% doesnt join hands and take over the system, the crypto will be safe. iirc, there were concerns when pool of miners joined and they have to reduce the pool size.",
"You'd have to kill every computer that has ever run that code. The history and ledger are immutable.",
"Imagine it like piratebay. If piratebay goes down and you have a .torrent you can still download the torrent and also upload it simultaneously for others.",
"It’s old but I only saw this recently, high five to 3B1B, such a succinct explanation. URL_0",
"As echoed by most of the top comments, the inherent benefit to cryptocurrencies is that it is decentralized. You can't just \"hack\" one entity, since the data is split among multiple users (in most cases, amongst millions). The closest anyone can \"hack\" a crypto currency is by attacking an exchange that holds user coins. The Mt.Gox \"hack\" is probably the most notorious example of what the media covered as a hack, but in reality, it was an attack on an exchange that held people's crypto wallets. The underlying technologies(BTC/ETH/others...) were in NO WAY hacked, but the offending parties were able to compromise Mt. Gox in a way that allowed them to gain access to users wallets and transfer huge amounts of money to a shady crypto wallet. On the other hand, i think the closest a popular blockchain was \"hacked\" wasn't an actual hack, but the DAO Attack on Ethereum was an exploit that allowed a nefarious actor to gain a huge amount of ETH that eventually resulted in the creation of ETC. At the end of the day, I believe that as long as money is involved, scammers will find a way to separate a fool and his cash. By holding crypto, it provides extra hoops for criminals to jump through so I trust it more as a storage of wealth compared to storing in a bank account. If someone is able to break through my bank's security, they have access to all my funds since my username/password are likely saved in a central database. For someone to break into my crypto wallet, they have to know me personally, break into my house, find the spot I hide my 30 word recovery phrase, transfer my crypto to an exchange, yada yada yada. There is nothing a hacker can do to try and get my crypto if he isn't physically able to get to me. & #x200B; Side note: I don't like ETC. edit: clarification/grammar",
"Kind of, if you took over 51% of the network you could validate your own false transactions & basically print money.",
"I'm going to be a little pedantic and clarify that \"Crypto\" doesn't always imply \"Cryptocurrency\" - especially when preceding the term \"software\". \"Crypto\" is short for \"Cryptography\"/\"Cryptographic\". Meaning obfuscation of messages/data to keep it secure. Cryptocurrency uses hashing (irreversible, unique identification data) but most people know about encryption. Coming into this thread, I was confused by the title until I read the body of the post.",
"This thread has made it clear to me how many people have no idea what they're talking about",
"Obligatory: Crypto is short for cryptography, crypto currency is short for cryptographic currency. So shortening crypo currency to crypto is very confusing, and should be avoided.",
"It's like a spreadsheet that lots and lots of people have a copy of. Loads of spread sheets can go missing and the rest still add up. And some people changing their spreadsheet to cheat will be found out by the multitude of other spreadsheets that don't agree with them. There's a bunch of math behind it, but essentially that's the idea. And there's always a total that depends on every other transaction before it so that it's not possible to alter anything in the transaction history.",
"I'll try to give it a go in a coin-agnostic way Imagine you live in a little village where there is neither physical money nor computers. Instead, every time you want to send \"money\" to someone, you must go to the village center and yell to the accountants: \"I'm giving Joe 50 bucks!\" Each accountant quickly takes note of your transaction and places it in their own notebook. When this notebook is full, the accountant says \"I'm done!\" and gets a new one. The other accountants check his book to see if there is no shady business. If most of them agree, they throw their own books away (because this one already has the transactions and everyone agrees it is fine), make a copy of this one for their own tracking and start over. The details of how they check if the book is okay or how they decide when two guys yell at the same time is not really relevant and vary from coin to coin. What's important in this analogy is that you can't \"hack\" the system because there is no single accountant. Every one can start taking notes if they like. Even if you kidnap or kill a guy, there is a bunch of other guys that have copies of the transactions and know what's ok and what is not. Now, if you could convince **most** accountants to say you have a million bucks, you have a million bucks. But it's a little bit harder than hacking one guy and, at this point, the whole system is screwed."
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n6stri | what does it mean for a liquid to be acidic? What is it that causes it to be so dangerous? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It means that this liquid contains something which is prone to giving away protons (hydrogen atoms without electrons). This is not necessarily dangerous. DNA is an acid. Your stomach is full of acid. All sorts of foods are acids. Acids are only dangerous in some situations. They're prone to donating their protons to a bunch of things that don't \"want\" them. Things like your skin. Of course, there are many acids, and the type of acid (as well as its concentration and other things) are huge factors in what they do. Most acids, when concentrated and dissolved in water, will burn people, but they won't instantly eat through an inch of steel."
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n6sxga | why do we easily forget our dreanns? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Think about it from the perspective of your most distant ancestors. You see a lion. Your brain immediately recalls past experiences with lions to figure out what to do, and you're like \"oh shit, gotta get out of here.\" Now what if your brain didn't filter out dreams? You might be like \"oh yeah, a lion, that's just Jeff shapeshifting, he's harmless\" and get eaten. A full third of your memories would be nonsense, which is a problem when you need to remember how reality works to decide what to do. So our brains evolved to forget dreams."
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n6t4rg | why are certain species (like Tigers & Lions) able to interbreed but others are not? | Just curious about the genetics of interbreeding. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Basically, the term species is a convenient kludge. It is not as based on solid biological differences as people tend to think, especially because we often assign organisms to different species before we have fully studied their ability to breed. Pretty much all of the big cats have some degree of inter fertility with each other, which one could argue makes them a single species. But lions and tigers and leopards all look so different and behave differently enough that of course the earliest scientists just assume that they were different enough to call different species. It gets even more complicated when you're dealing with things like bacteria. Two different strains of e coli, which we refer to as the same species, can be as genetically distinct from each other as you are from a catfish.",
"Tigers and lions both belong to the same genus, Panthera, their ancestors only diverged from each other around 4-5 million years ago. [Many members]( URL_0 ) of the Panthera genus can interbreed, not just tigers and lions. They can also breed with jaguars and leopards. It's not a specific rule and there probably are exceptions but members of the same genus are more closely related and more likely to be able to reproduce. Humans and chimpanzees for example are not in the same genus, we are in the genus Homo and chimps and bonobos are in the genus Pan. Gorillas are in their own genus. We were in the same genus as Homo Erectus so there's a chance we might have been able to produce offspring with them.",
"I think it has to do with how long ago they split genetically. The more recent the change, the more likely it is that they can still interbreed.",
"Animals that are different species but the same genus can produce sterile offspring. That just means they are close enough related evolutionary speaking, like he difference between cousins and siblings. The offspring are called hybrids, another popular example is horse + donkey = mule.",
"To be the same species they have to be able to breed and produce fertile offspring. So tiger x lion, horse x donkeys are infertile. I guess they are genetically similar enough to reproduce but genetically different enough for that offspring to be infertile",
"At the simplest level, there are three requirements for successful breeding **Can sex occur**: Species need to have compatible genitalia, and have sufficient interest in each other to have sex and/or recognise fertile periods in each other **Can sperm penetrate the egg**: The sperm needs to be able to survive the trip to the egg and then penetrate into the egg when it arrives. The more different two species are, the greater the chance that female's immune system will be overly hostile to the sprem, or that the sperm lacks the chemical tools to penetrate the egg. **Can the species combine genetic information to make a viable offspring**: Sexual reproduction means taking one chromosome from each parent's pair for all chromosomes. Collectively, the DNA in these chromosomes are like blueprints and instructions for what each cell in the body should do. At the largescale this determines bone, organ and muscle locations; and the micro-scale this determines the protein productions and cellular activity that keeps tissue alive. Randomly combining chromosomes and getting a viable blueprint for an offspring is not trivial. Even among the same species, most fertilised eggs are miscarriages due to the embryo failing to thrive or triggering hostile activity from the mother's immune system. \\--------------- In summary, the strictest limit on inter-breeding is \"If I randomly combine chromosomes from these species, do I get a valid set of microbiological instructions that can keep an animal alive\". The longer it has been since two organisms interbred, the more likely it is that they have some mutual incompatibility in their genetics that will cause a reproductive failure. There is no hard and fast rule about when this will occur or why, so I can't tell you why Ligers are a thing, but you can't crossbreed a golden eagle with a red-tailed hawk. Ultimately it is some combination of \"they won't have sex\" or \"something in the genes is too different, they are too dissimilar\". Which is all true, but not a precise, single answer. The overall idea is clear in theory though: If two animals have different genetic instructions to make their bodies, eventually the two of them are so different that their DNA cannot be combined to make a valid set of instructions for a child.",
"Sometimes species have barriers to interbreeding. Two common types are prezygotic(before the egg and sperm are meant to meet) and post zygotic (after the egg and sperm meet) One prezygotic barrier would be, say a dog and a snake. There’s no way that dog’s reproductive organ is going to physically fit into a snake’s. A post zygotic barrier would be that a a mile, a cross breed between a horse and a donkey, cannot reproduce because it has an odd number of chromosomes, so once the egg and sperm meet, even if two mules are able to do that, they egg and sperm will not form a viable zygote (the ball of cells that starts to form into a baby)",
"My understanding here is if you can get a cromosomal match you can produce offspring. If two species evolutionary divergance isn't too far in the past then it's likely they'll still have the same amount of chromosomes and those chromosomes will be homologous which means that the chromosomes can match up becuase the genes within will be in the right spots for the right things and they are roughly the same size. For example a lion has a chromosome that has the gene for sharp claws and a tiger has a chromosome that has the gene for sharp claws and these chromosomes are close enough to the same size and have close enough to the right genes in the right spots. So essentially if the gametes (sperm and eggs) match enough they can produce offspring. So like other people are saying with genera and species, those are assigned by people to make some order and that system was put into place long before we knew about genes. It can discribe gene compatibility but also really discribes similarities in morphology and gene compatibility."
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n6ta40 | How does the wind work? Where does it come from? What causes it to stop? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"just like most of the phenomenon on earth this is also caused by sun. The sun unevenly heats the air causing a change in densities. This causes the air to move from higher density to lower density which we call wind."
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n6tajy | The IMRaD format | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Interesting, I've always seen it abbreviated as IMRD but apparently this is a real thing. Anyway: IMR(a)D is a structure format for scientific reports/papers. It divides the paper into four main sections: the introduction, materials/methods, results and discussion. - The introduction describes your problem area. Typically you'll start a paper with some statistics that indicate something is a real problem for society and needs a (better) solution. You gather literature to offer the necessary background on the problem, then give a brief overview of what you did to develop a solution and how. - Materials/methods is where you describe what you did in exact detail. That includes everything from experimental protocols to the statistical software you used to process your data. Reproducibility is important, and a good methods section will let others verify your results by doing it themselves. - Results speaks for itself: this is where you put all your data. A good results section should form a sort of story, where you make your points in a logical order to support your overall goal. - Discussion is all about taking your data and applying it to the problem. You start with a quick summary of your results, then compare it with/fit it into existing literature. You finish with a general conclusion. E: spelling"
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n6tb2h | How does 911 tell the difference between prank calls and legit calls? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When receiving any calls regarding possible gunshots, there’s usually more than one person who will call in. Officers will respond to the call and check it out. If it turns out to be fireworks, that’s obviously a better outcome than the alternative. It’s good to call in if you suspect gunshots, even if you’re not certain.",
"911 dispatcher for two small Massachusetts towns here. There is a statistic that something like every 300th call is an actual emergency. We are taught to treat every call as if it is an actual emergency because you do not want to get complacent. Some towns even have policies that they must respond to every 911 call, even if the person on the line says it is accidental, and that they don't actually need anything. Long story short, at least for me, I treat every call as real, until the police officers tell me it isn't. This is also why swatting is a scary concept to me.",
"Ideally they don't. It depends on where you are, but the potential harm of ignoring a real emergency is so much greater than the harm of wasting resources by unncessarily responding to prank call, that most tend to treat any call as real until proven otherwise. This is especially necessary, because people who call emergency hotlines tend to be not very calm. Fear, anger, grief, shock etc tend to make people behave in non-standard ways. Few people sound there best when they are in or have witnessed something that requires calling an emergency hotline. It is not even out of the realm of possibility that someone may giggle while calling about a real problem. There may be repeat customers who end up getting a boy who cried wolf treatment and when there are not enough resources some may use their judgment to prioritize real sounding emergencies before fake sounding ones, but generally if you call an emergency hotline about things like gun shots, stuff on fire or anything that sounds like heart attack they will send someone to check that out. There are a couple of news articles about operators who mistakenly refused to send anyone to what they thought was a prank call and it didn't go well for them.",
"Patterns of behavior and malicious plausibility. In other words, they use their intuition. If they get repeat calls about something, they're going to learn that someone is fucking with them. They'll probably still respond to every call with concern, but if they start to notice a pattern of behavior regarding fake calls, they'll also start investigating the origin."
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n6ticm | if fresh/drinkable water is so scarce, why do we use it to clean and wash our stuff? Couldn't we use something else? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are diminishing returns at some point. Depending on the area and situation, there are some areas that ban things like watering lawns, washing cars etc in order to reduce consumption. But there is a point where the savings incur costs too - unsanitary practices, lack of hygiene lead to disease and other health issues. The little savings by not washing leads to even more waste and loss in other areas. In general, day to day stuff like cleaning clothes, short showers, use for waste disposal and drinking do not consume a lot of water per person. Alternatives would be expensive, inconvenient and possibly dangerous (eg cleaning chemicals).",
"Personal Consumption is not a huge problem. Look at what a Jeans takes to make, vs what you use per day. Also in for example chemistry, where water can react, Nitrogen is used for cleaning certain types of test tubes.",
"In my town, new houses are required to have a rainwater tank and pump connected to the toilets, laundry and outdoor taps. The system is set up so that, if the tank runs dry, it just uses the town water supply, but at least it reduces consumption to some extent.",
"Yes. We can use recycled waste water, and rainwater collected from streets, parks and gardens etc. Various kinds of controls and treatments are still needed though. Someone else mentioned it takes two plumbing systems. This is true. Which means it's possible (easier) to do that for new housing and commercial developments. It needs support from governments in various ways and it needs to be made an appealing enough proposition for developers. Both technically and financially",
"A big part of the cost of drinkable water is to collect and pump it around. The water purification part is not that expensive in the grand scheme of things. This means that unpurified water would still be almost as expensive then drinking water. In fact having two sepperate systems would be almost double the cost from having just a single system.",
"The main reason is that it keeps plumbing systems simple. If you wanted to deliver non-potable water to households you'd need a whole extra system of pipes. If you want to capture non-potable water in your home you need the right systems in. Domestic systems do exist though - capturing rainwater or washing water for flushing toilets, for example. Arguably we could do a lot better with this; I don't think it's that hard to design some basic systems into a property.",
"Scarcity of water is very regional. Some places have too much some have too little. If there isnt enough water to sustain the population then the population moves, or dies out. On planet earth water isnt scarce except in some desert environments like the american south west, the middle east etc.",
"So many complex explanations. But the truth it where you use it to clean and wash your stuff it isn't scarce, and in places where it is scarce that simply doesn't happen. Scarcity can be fought to a degree, and rich countries will manage even better even if the environment doesn't help them, poorer countries can't manage and that ads the scarcity. At the end it's not the amount that we have but the availability of it, when supply is good and meets demand, people will use it for everything. Poorer countries that experience droughts and have worse systems in place, though luck. Resources are not exactly shared equally geographically, if you went to Venezuela, before socialism, supply of gasoline was so high + subsidies, people were using it for everything; cheaper than water, gasoline was whatever; meanwhile the rest of the world who didn't have that much gas and oil reserves, it was expensive and much more scarce, and by more expensive I mean orders of magnitude more expensive.",
"In some areas \"gray water\" systems do exist for capturing and reusing water, but in general the cost of installing a whole extra plumbing system isn't worth the water that would be saved in a residential setting. I've also lived in a house that had a special white faucet for getting purified drinking water from a separate tank -- but again, that's rarely worth the added expense of the extra plumbing. Tl;dr: the infrastructure to support separate water supplies is usually more expensive than just using one water supply for everything."
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n6udpi | Would x-rays or gamma rays be even more efficient to transmit data(compared to fiber optic)? | Maybe this should be under ELI5 but if fiber optics are more effective than radio waves for transmitting data, would that mean that x-rays or gamma rays would be even better at transmitting data? I tried googling this a bit, and from what I've read...can understand it comes down to the fact the its difficult to channel the waves in a controllable manner like we do with fiber optics and there's concerns of health risk... but for communication with satellites would those wave lengths be more effective? This may not have been focused enough but I'm genuinely curious and would love if someone could explain this to me or educate me about this broad subject.( I have a basic level of understanding of physics but am not in the field or educated enough to where equations would help!) thank you in advance! | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In theory it would allow higher data-rates. But we are far far away from reaching the theorethical (frequency) limit of fibreoptical cables. X-rays and Gamma Rays do indeed have a very high frequency. But you'd need to be able to modulate them efficiently, and then properly focus it. So it would only work for broadcasting at high power wich would be a *massive* health risk near the senders. (I.E. whenever you send you send in all directions equally, wich is pretty shitty when you want to talk to a sattelite without giving cancer to all towns nearby) Also the receivers would need to have extremely small sizes. An \"antenna\" for visible light would only be a few hundred atoms wide, wich is why we use photodiodes as receivers. I'm not aware of any material that you could use to catch gammaray photons (you need a matching excitation state, wich works fine in the single digit electronvolt range, but soft xrays are already 100eV) So summed up, you receive tons of technical difficulties and risks for no gain."
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n6uox9 | . How it's possible for the earth to create the magnetic field? If there is a iron core how it created? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are other ways to create a magnetic field besides some bar of iron. Any time you move electric charges, that also creates a magnetic field (every electric motor works this way). The core of the Earth is very hot, so hot liquids from the core rise up, while colder liquids sink down again. This moves a lot of charges around, which creates the Earth's electric field. However, the whole thing is rather complex, and not yet all that well understood. Scientists have a lot of work left to do in this area.",
"The most accepted theory is the geodynamo effect. When liquid electrically conductive material (I.E. the outer core of earth) rotates it causes a magnetic field through a combination of convective material streams and the law of electrical induction. The law of induction simply states that a changing electrical field causes a \"whirl\" of magnetic field. Through a feedback loop (that the magnetic field makes electrons move wich causes the changing electrical field) once a tiny magnetic field is created (or supplied from the outside) it gets amplified and keeps itself stable (Magnetism is sadly hard to ELI5 without scribbling on a blackboard)"
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n6vlyl | How does furniture polish work? | What happens to the furniture you apply it onto, and what’s the chemistry behind it? I found a DIY recipe, and it involves white vinegar, olive oil, and lemon. How would these ingredients work together as a furniture polish? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Wood is naturally porous - like a sponge. Wood is sometimes treated with oil, but typically it's vanished. Wood is basically coated in something to make it shiny. This coating can be too many things: * The excretions of lac beetles is very traditional (shellac, lacquer) - this is also used on many candies to make it shiny. * Nitrocellulose was popular in the early 1900s * Urethane or acrylic plastic is common today * Linseed oil is sometimes used * Natural waxes like beeswax, or synthetic wax from crude oil can also be used * Natural resins like amber, copal, and mastic can be used * Epoxy resins are used for extra durability The actual polish typically contains an oil or wax - when you rub this on it leaves a residue that makes it shiny. Some polishes can contain acids (vinegar, lemon, or synthetic ones), or solvents that can dissolve or thin some of the original finishes. Sometimes this can make it shinier, remove scratches, etc - but it can also weaken and degrade the finish. I would typically recommend a wax - like a paste finishing wax. These don't remove or damage the old finish, you're just adding something on top to make it shiny. If it's in bad shape - gel paint stripper to remove the old finish and a can or spray bottle of polyurethane will give it a good maintenance free finish that will last for many years."
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n6vmry | What would actually happen if an unstoppable force met an immovable object? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A paradox. By definition, these are two contradictory definitions which cannot coexist. If the immovable object blocks the unstoppable force then the force is not unstoppable. Likewise, if the unstoppable force moves the immovable object then the object isn't immovable.",
"The answer is a lot less interesting than you'd expect simply because it's what you already know. Not even theoretical physics can help! You know F=ma. Force equals mass times acceleration. Of course the force is the unstoppable force so F is infinite. In this equation, we can think of mass as being a resistance to movement. If you try to calculate a you'll get a = F/m. So, what's an immovable object? An object with infinite mass! Well. Kind of. See, here's the issue. An unstoppable force would be F = infinity and an immovable object would be m = infinity. So what's a? a= infinity/infinity. This is what mathematicians would call an indeterminate form. At this point physics doesn't make sense and math can't help us. We are left with an undefined answer. Damn! But there is a technical bit. Indeterminate forms can be evaluated if you know *how fast* either F or m grows if you add more of it. So, is it easier for the unstoppable force to increase a bit or is it easier for the immovable object to become a but more immovable? If it were easier for the immovable object to become a bit more immovable (whatever this means), then a = 0 and the immovable object wins as m grows faster than F at infinity. If it were easier for the unstoppable force to become a bit stronger/more unstoppable, then a = infinity and the unstoppable force wins as F grows faster than m at infinity. In the end, it's still just a thought experiment with no *truly* logical answer because what does it even mean for something to become a bit more unstoppable or a bit more unmovable? 🤔",
"You will find that the unstoppable force is in fact stoppable and the immovable object is in fact movable.",
"They would pass through each other without interacting with each other. They allows them to still exist, meet, and not change their defining features."
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n6whcv | Why does restarting my router sometimes help with internet connectivity problems? | I mean, what changes with that reboot that helps? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine that you start solving an equation in your notebook. Halfway through you notice that the number don't add up anymore. You try to figure out what the problem is but you can't seem to find it. So you just tear that page from the notebook and start again from the beginning with a fresh perspective. This is similar to what happens with your computer. For some reason a mistake was made in its calculation that it's not programmed to recover from. So when you restart the computer it starts from scratch. Now, you can hope that whatever caused the problem doesn't occur again.",
"Depending on what the issue is, a restart of the router forces it to sync back up to the equipment at the exchange and then reauthenticate the connection. When it syncs back up, the equipment at the exchange will look at the properties of the line at that point and you will connect at the best speed for the conditions if the line at that time. So if something had been causing interference for a while, which has now stopped, what should happen is that the exchange drops the speed while the interference is there and raises it when the interference goes. However, this does not always happen. When you reauthenticate, most residential connections will be given a new external IP address. You may also find you will be using a different path through to the national backbone, so if some of the infrastructure that everybody uses, rather than just yourself, is having issues, a reboot may get you on a path that avoids that element. The other thing that may be happening is that the router itself may be having issues. If, for example, it has not been clearing its ram properly during use, a reboot may clear that in the same way that you would restart your computer if it was running slowly.",
"Its the general idea of \"turn it off and on again\". If something went wrong with the connection, some route or IP was messed up, then turn it off and then on again, which will force the router to go through its startup routine, which includes setting up the configuration properly. So in short, you force a reset on the configuration which will solve the problem if something there got messed up while the router was running.",
"So in a perfectly working system you wouldn't think you need to reboot. But things like power changes / brownouts, Network interruptions can all have adverse effects on a router and its ability to hand out addresses properly. Sometimes to resolve this we can bring it a electronically cleaner connection by using a good UPS that has surge capacity built in for phone or data line. If there's a buggy bad device on the network (sometimes it just takes an older device) you may find that you have more issues when one device is having issues and is constantly re-asking for data."
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n6wtm4 | - what is it that causes you to wake up naturally? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A variety of factors, but the main one is something called the Circadian Rhythm. The human brain produces a chemical called melatonin. It's always doing this, but the amount fluctuates throughout the day. When melatonin is high, we become sleepy, and when it's low, we become wakeful. We fall asleep and wake up according to the cycling between high and low, which takes about 24 hours to complete one full rotation. This is sometimes called the biological clock, because it's like an internal sense of time. However, this rhythm is sensitive to external conditions. We have evolved to adjust our circadian rhythms based on the light we're exposed to, because this makes us sync up with the day/night cycle. Light destroys melatonin, so when light is high, melatonin is lower than normal, and when light is low, melatonin is as high as it would normally be. Gradually, this nudges our circadian rhythms into a schedule that matches up with the light/dark cycle we're exposed to. This is also why it's recommended that people with insomnia don't use computers, phones and other electronic screens for about an hour before they want to go to bed - because the strong light these devices give off destroys melatonin, and it takes time for the brain to replenish it to the point of feeling sleepy. Also, the reason this doesn't happen with regular light bulbs is because it's specifically a kind of blue-coloured light that does this. Traditional light bulbs, by sheer chance, don't produce much blue light. Computer screens do."
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n6x2d3 | Where does the data go when you format a disk? | Let's say your disk is 500 gigabytes. At around %80 percent you perform a disk format. What does the computer do to the 400 gbs of data, to have that disk empty? Also how is it so that the disk don't get full because you already stored around at least 500 gbs of data before? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Write something in sand. Now brush it away. Where did the data go? To the same place as data on a hard drive.",
"It doesn't go anywhere. It stays on the disk and is marked as free space until something new overwrites it. VSauce has a good video about this: [Where do deleted files go?]( URL_0 )",
"There are two ways this works: 1. In a full format - the entire disk is filled with ones or zeroes - this all data is permanently erased 2. In a quick format - a new file system is created. A file system has a log of all the files. So for example it might say at the 250th GB you have this photo of your grandmother saved. Now when you open that photo, the computer looks at that section at the 250th GB. When you quick format and delete that log - the computer sees it as random data and ignores it. Often data is fragmented - if you save a 100GB file - the computer might break it into 10GB chunks and save each chunk in a random place. In this case the log will say this is part 1, part 2, etc."
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n6xkqz | where does the electricity that forms lightning come from and why does it accumulate to the point of needing to discharge in such a manner? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Know how you can drag your feet across the carpet and then touch something metal and get shocked? That's a tiny lighting bolt. There is friction between the particles in clouds, which causes an electrical charge to build up. This charge builds up until it is strong enough to overcome the electrical resistance between where it is and the ground. Same way the \"lightning\" from your finger only jumps to the metal object when you're close and it can overcome the resistance."
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n6xuxw | Why are vaccines not passed from mother to child? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Quick genetics class - genes are properties that you are born with, based on the respective genes of your parents. Skills and abilities gained in life are not genetic; a kid whose parents could juggle wouldn't be born able to juggle. A vaccine prompts a reaction from your body in order to build immunity, which is an \"acquired skill\" because the parent wasn't born with those antibodies. Also, even if a parent is naturally immune to a disease, that doesn't guarantee immunity in the child due to mutations and genetic variation from having 2 parents. Edit: typo"
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n6xzob | Options Trading | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"You aren't buying the asset. You're buying the option to buy, or sell, the asset before a future date at a certain price. You're betting on the asset price to go up (or down) so you can buy it later for less than its new higher price (or sell for more than its new lower price). If you choose not to exercise the option, it expires on a predetermined future date and you have only lost the amount you spent to buy the option."
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n6yos8 | why can’t phone cameras just record horizontally whilst in a vertical orientation? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The sensor is a rectangle, not a square, and it’s proportional to the phone’s rectangular dimensions. So when the phone is held vertically, the camera sensor is also vertical. If you wanted the image to be horizontal then you have to crop it, which means you’d be using less pixels than the sensor is capable of. That’s something you can easily do after taking the picture so most manufacturers don’t bother to complicate the picture taking software with that sort of option when taking a picture. Someone certainly could build a phone where the sensor was perpendicular to the camera orientation so that you could use the full sensor but probably not many people have ever requested that feature so it’s not going to be very common.",
"Phone camera sensors do not have the same resolution horizontally vs vertically - while it's certainly possible, you will lose some of the resolution (and hence clarity) vs manually rotating the phone."
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n6zobs | What happens in the brain during an epileptic seizure? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The brain is partially made up of neurons, which are nerve cells that communicate with each other using electricity. The cells basically fire an electric signal which then trigger the next neuron to do the same and so forth. This is how any \"message\" travels through the nervous system, for example a pain felt in your foot travels as an electrical signal through your spinal cord and reaches the different structures in your brain that respond and recognize it, and the other way around - an intention you have of moving your foot travels the other way from your brain down to the muscles in your foot to cause them to move. Now, imagine that some or all of the neurons in your brain just started firing at once in an abnormal, synchronized way. That's basically what happens when someone is having an epileptic seizure. There are lots of different types of epileptic seizures, depending on how many and which neurons are dysfunctioning. Some only involve specific parts of the brain (these are called focal seizures) and could for example result in a localized seizure of your arm, while others originate from the most central structures of the brain (these are called generalized seizures) and mostly result in immediate loss of consciousness."
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n6zvfp | Why do PC/mobile screens/TVs get darker when there is daylight? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don’t, it’s just that they are less bright on contrast to the room they are in, it’s the same reason a lift bulb outside during the day barely looks like it’s lit up, while it can light up an entire room at night"
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n6zzry | Are Voices like Fingerprints? | In other words, does every person have a unique voice sound/tone? So there are potentially 7 billion variations of how a voice can sound? Or, are there a finite number of pitches/tones from a voicebox, and someone (or many people) have the exact some sounding voice as you do? (Referring to a person's natural voice, not voice impersonators like Dana Carvey or Frank Caliendo).. (edited for grammar) | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yep. Each voice is completely unique to the individual. Between the size of a person, shape of their larynx and other parts of the body, and learned intonation every voice ends up being unique and identifiable.",
"A lot of the answers here are mathematically misleading. Any biometric - face, fingerprint, iris, voice, whatever, will ultimately measure the similarity between two samples. We set a threshold based upon what similarity we will accept. Also, computers don’t match images, they match templates. For example, a 2 MB face image will have a 300 byte template. Even if faces are unique a template may not be. It doesn’t make sense to say each voice is unique. It is unique to some degree of probability. For example, we might say two samples are the same with a probability we are wrong (false match) of .001%. Each biometric is unique in how well it can discriminate. Irises can easily identify someone in a population of billions with a very low false match probability. Two fingerprints can work up to 100s of millions. Voice is typically done differently. It is done as a 1:1 verification (like phone banking). You register a sample and the software verifies the voice on the phone as probably you. Apples FaceID does verification too. These are much easier problems than 1:N identification. Voice is not a great biometric for 1:N. In the tests I have seen they have a database of a few thousand. The voices may be unique but the voice biometric (template) is not all that unique. Probably unique in database population: Iris: 1,000,000,000 Fingerprint: 1,000,000 Two fingers: 100,000,000 Face: 1,000,000 Voice: 2,000",
"/u/[SmallpoxTurtleFred]( URL_0 ) answered this pretty well, but I want to elaborate. We can't say that every voice is unique, *nor can we say that every fingerprint is unique*. What we can say is \"how much information is contained in each fingerprint.\" (People will sometimes refer to this as \"entropy.\") There are naive and less naive ways to answer this. Naively, we might just say something like \"how big would a computer disk have to be to record the information contained in your fingerprint.\" But that might overestimate; for example, if I want to create a new biometric measure where I identify people by how many fingers they have, I might naively say \"aha, 'number of fingers' contains about four bits of entropy, because I need to represent values from 0 to 11.\" But in practice almost everybody has ten fingers, so the actual entropy in \"how many fingers do you have\" is pretty limited. :) A more practical way to answer this is to look at some particular *discriminator*. For example, someone might build a computer program that, given two recordings of a voice, can tell you when they're of the same person or not. If you had a program like that, you'd probably want to test it empirically. And to do that, what you'd do is take a bunch of samples of voices and randomly mix and match them—sometimes you'd give the program two voices from the same person, and sometimes two from different people. And you'd record how often the program was right in both cases—when it was able to tell that the same person was the same person, and when it was able to tell that two different people were two different people. If you did this a whole bunch of times—enough to get a good idea of how well the program worked—you'd have a couple of numbers commonly used in these problems. You'd have a number called \"precision\", which would be how often the program said \"same person\" and it was right, and a number called \"recall\", which would be how often the program said \"same person\" out of all the samples that were *actually* the same person. (There are varying names for these two terms; in medicine these are called \"specificity\" and \"sensitivity\", like with a COVID test: specificity is how often it says \"you've got COVID\" and you do, and \"sensitivity\" is how often you've got COVID and it *says* you do.) Anyway, there's a ton of empirical research on this. My (layperson's) understanding is that voice print analysis is good enough for non-adversarial situations (like, subtitling a movie), but not good enough that you'd want to trust it on its own for something like a bank transaction.",
"Yes, every person's voice is unique. Even if one or two people have a voice that's remarkably similar to yours , even if it's 99.99% similar, it's still not exactly the same. Just like a fingerprint, a voice can sound the same as another person's voice at a quick glance. It might even sound the same after a few hours of listening, but there are always differences. Physical differences include the size / thickness of vocal cords, the size of the resonation chamber, the natural pitch used by that person, even the size and shape of their sinuses and teeth. Then there are other factors: How that person pronounces words and syllables, local accent and dialect, how emotion affects their speaking tone, how loud or quiet they pronounce each individual part of each word, and so on and so forth. In short, no two voices are ever exactly the same."
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n704o0 | When we eat something that is fried in oil with our bare hands and oil sticks to our skin, we clean it by washing with soap but, How does our mouth deals with it? | For example eating a very oily fries. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The whole inside of our mouth is constantly coated with saliva. For realistic amounts of oil, that's sufficient to basically provide \"nature's non-stick.\" If you just eat a chunk of lard (please don't), you'll quickly discover that it's entirely possible to coat your mouth with fat. Eventually your saliva will take care of it, but it'll be disgusting for a while.",
"Your saliva is more than just mouth slime, it also has enzymes that start digestion of food. It contains amylases that start breaking down carbohydrates and lipases that begin the digestion of fats. Spit is neat!"
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n70ht7 | How do modern smartwatches calculate steps, blood pressure and oxygen level in blood ? | What are the technology behind this ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Oxygen level is done via the color of your blood. That is called *Reflectance pulse oximetry.* The watch shines a light on your skin and the color reflection lets it measure blood flow and oxygenation. Steps are calculated by the accelerometer, which basically measures how fast and where the watch is going. There is a little math and analysis going on, but basically one swing forward and back is one step, because we swing our arms synchronous with our legs."
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n71cyr | What happens when an electronic device gets "bricked"? Some parts have to still be salvageable, right? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It usually means that the firmware or software that boots up the device has become corrupted and prevents the device from even starting. It is usually possible to get a fresh install from another source pushed to the device, but you may need special equipment to do it.",
"“Bricked” is a general term for any failure that causes the device to not turn on. This can be a software failure and all the hardware is totally fine, or it can be a total loss because you dropped it in boiling saltwater. How much a bricked device is still worth and how much data can be recovered is a case-by-case situation."
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n72og5 | How do genetic modifications work and could they ever be possible on living humans? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It's definitely possible. It's done. It's called \"gene therapy\". [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) It's promising but risky, it's still in the research phases."
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n73dia | - Why are the cars in Formula 1 and Formula-E not identical on the outside? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Formula E cars are much smaller to run on the tighter street circuit tracks the series typically runs. Lower speeds, tighter turning radius, more bumper car action. Formula 1 cars are *much* longer for aerodynamic efficiency at high speed on more traditional tracks like Spa. They physically couldn’t get around some of the Formula E tracks, and can barely get around Monaco these days. Formula E is also basically a spec series for bodywork so that manufacturers are spending their money researching road-relevant battery and generator technology and not fighting over aerodynamics.",
"They are completely different race categories with different restrictions. From an engineering standpoint it’s also a very different layout. Formula one cars have a 1.6 six cylinder engine behind the driver formula e as a large battery pack in the floor."
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n73y9y | Why are we able te remember that we are forgetting something and not what? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Recognizing there's a hole is different than knowing what was in the hole. Our brains work, a lot more than we usually notice, by filling in blanks with \"best guess\" approximations. Our brains have a lot of machinery to recognize holes in our senses or memories. This is, among other things, why people can clearly \"remember\" events that you can conclusively prove didn't happen the way they remember. When we \"remember that we're forgetting\", we're recognizing a hole. \"Something is supposed to be here but I don't know what it is.\" That is totally different than \"What goes in this hole?\". Suppose I show you a shelf on a library and tell you that shelf is supposed to be full. It's really easy to see where a book is missing. That doesn't tell you much about which book is missing. Edit: typo",
"Because in your brain it works like this: need to pick up package tomorrow morning at 9am, therefore 1) Important 2) Must perform action in morning. 3) for details click here. So, when you access your memory later, you realize the prominent thing in that item, which is \"Important\". Ok, so search your memory a bit more, you get \"in the morning\". The third part is just some non-important part of that memory, and you'll need another piece of info to jog that memory."
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n742ju | if we could bring back an extinct species, how would we get around inbreeding if we only had one specimen to clone? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When sexual reproduction occurs, there is a random mix of the genes of the two parents. Traits may be passed on genetically but may not be. Which is why all of the children of parents do not have the same color hair, eyes, etc. or be the same height. There is genetic variation in the offspring. So you would clone a large number of the species. You would then have them reproduce. And you need 2 different sexes to sexually reproduce. You have a lot of them produce a lot of offspring. Even though the original clones may only have 2 different sets of genes, the offspring will have varied genes. Some offspring will have bad genetic combinations due to inbreeding but others will not. So you prevent those with bad genes from further reproducing. You let the good ones continue to reproduce, with more genetic variation. So basically it is a numbers game. Clone a lot of them and you will get enough healthy offspring to continue reproducing.",
"You can't breed something at all with one specimen. You would have to clone another specimen of the opposite sex to breed it with or continue cloning the same specimen if you don't have any more samples to work with.",
"Read up about the 50/500 rule. It’s a rough estimate to avoid inbreeding and genetic drift.",
"or like how is harvesting gametes from one single animal can prevent the same problem, for instance white rhino",
"Inbreeding is fine. Look at the royal family. Some of them live to be almost 100, and their family tree looks like a poplar."
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n74bzw | why do we move less often while sleeping as we grow older? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Its something to do with the connections in your brain being fully aligned after puberty which leads to your body shutting itself down properly during sleep. Thats why you move less and are less likely to wet the bed,, Unless you are really drunk, and then the drink blocks those connections."
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n74exc | Why do USB-Sticks get hot when you transfer data? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The sticks contain a little chip that is able to store data. In order to write or read data from it, a current must pass through the chip. When a current passes through something, there is some resistance, meaning some of the energy of that current is lost as heat. This is the same for all electronics and it's why computers have fans to cool their components.",
"Same as why anything else electronic or electrical gets hot when you use it: [resistive heating]( URL_0 ). Because there are no perfect, 100% efficient electrical conductors, when you pass electricity through a wire some of the energy is lost due to having to overcome the resistance of the conductor, and that waste energy is shed as heat."
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n74wpw | How does EMDR therapy work? | I don't understand how watching a light go back and forth helps your brain uncover and cope with repressed memories. What does it do to your brain that allows you to openly address trauma? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Three(ish) reasons: 1. Mild distraction 2. Less distressing type of exposure therapy 3. Mimicking the eye movements during REM sleep to help your conscious brain process similar to how process things while sleeping 1. Subset of this: engaging both the left and right sides of the brain Processing trauma is supposed to be easier when you are not fully focused on the trauma. EMDR is a constant, mild distraction, allowing your attention to be only partially on the trauma. This is similar to how distraction helps people deal with physical pain or discomfort. EMDR is not the *only* way to help people gain enough space from the mental pain to discuss their trauma, but it's simple to do, somewhat relaxing, and not harmful. It also is a form of exposure therapy that is less distressing. Avoidance is a really common symptom of trauma, but avoidance tends to worsen over time. By bringing the trauma up when you are more relaxed and slightly distracted, you can separate the traumatic memories from the extreme negative reaction over time. Finally, the side-to-side aspect of it is supposed to replicate some of the effects of REM sleep, where your eyes are moving side to side rapidly as your brain processes things. Since most of us cannot choose what we dream about, and we don't have a therapist in our dreams helping us, the idea is to enter a similar state of your brain while awake and able talk to your therapist. One theory is that this side-to-side motion engages both sides of the brain, whether when naturally occurring during sleep or when induced via EMDR. Since trauma lives mostly on the right, emotional/visual/feeling/creative side of the brain, engaging the left side for analytical thinking and speaking can help process it more directly. This \"trauma is on the right side of the brain\" theory is part of why things like art therapy and dance therapy are helpful (they also are on the right side of the brain)."
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n75qik | - Why are body controlling parasites so common in insects, amphibians, etc., as opposed to humans? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mammal brains are enormously complex and control a lot of delicate behaviors and functions. It’s a huge task to rewire it without just killing the host. Insect brains are much more simple nerve clusters that only have a few basic behaviors pre-programmed in. It’s like trying to steal a bike and trying to steal an aircraft carrier. Any doof can ride your bike away, but you’re gonna need to figure out how to spin up a nuclear reactor before that ship will move.",
"Mammal brains are way more complex. Usually the host just dies instead of any particular urge being generated",
"If your interested in films about body/mind controlling parasites I highly recommend “Upstream Color” (2013). It’s a strange and unsettling movie that is very underrated..."
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n77sgh | What does it mean when music is played in a certain "key" | I understand musical notes but nobody has been able to explain to me what a "key" is in music. For example, how does "beethovens 3rd symphony in e-minor" differ from "beethovens 3rd symphony in f-minor"? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A key has two parts - the selection of notes you use, and the specific note you choose to be the \"tonal center\" or home note of your piece. There are 12 notes in all, and you typically choose 7 of them to make up your scale. If you think of the numbers on a clock, and you mark 7 of them as \"your\" notes according to a pattern\\*, and one as your tonal center, you can get an idea of how that works. The tonal center is the one you typically come back to in order to give a sense of finality to your musical phrase or passage. Anyway, in the examples you use, E and F are the tonal centers, and the \"major\" or \"minor\" indicate the pattern by which you choose your 7 notes. In E minor, you'd center on E, and choose your 7 notes based on a \"minor\" pattern\\*. In F minor, you'd center on F and choose your 7 notes based on the same \"minor\" pattern.",
"There's a lot of overcomplication and a lot wrong in these answers. I'm a musician, here's my take: The \"key\" a song is played in is what note you're calling \"home\" aka what note you (usually) start/end on. Any given song or melody can be played in any \"key\". All the intervals (gaps up and down) between notes always stay the same, but the entire thing is shifted up or down so that the last note/chord is an A (in the key of A), or a B (in the key of B) etc. To illustrate: [Here's a guy playing the same 10 seconds of piano music in all 12 keys]( URL_0 ). Note that it's the exact same melody each time, just shifted higher and higher each time. For your second question: In classical music the key is often mentioned in the piece titles because the composers usually didn't give the songs \"names\". But they did indicate what key each piece they wrote was supposed to be played in. So to refer to a given song from someone who wrote a bunch of them like Beethoven, you'd say \"3rd symphony in E minor\" - aka the 3rd symphony (a type of music) that he wrote which was in the key of E minor. **This is exactly like if modern artists didn't name songs and we had to call Girls Like You \"Maroon 5's 4th ballad in C\".**",
"basically, a Key is a set of notes that sound good together. A major key sounds happy and a minor key sounds sad. if you take a minor or major key they are always the same pattern. The letter of the key is the note that the key is based on and the pattern for major or minor starts from that note. So on a piano C-Major starts from the note C and then it goes up the notes in the pattern for major, which happens to be all the white notes. if you move all the notes from c major up a tone, you start on D with the same pattern and you get D major."
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n780ma | I've seen so many videos of people with Tourrette syndrome, whistling or saying specific words like bi**h or hello there, what makes them use specific words when it's not intentional? (Why these words specifically) | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"particular tics are things their brain has attached to. Something they thought was interesting, funny, unusual, or awful... basically anything that might stand out over other things has a higher chance of becoming a tic.",
"As far as I can find, there isn't a solid answer, but it's important to note that being unable to control swearing (coprolalia) only affects about 10% of people with Tourette's but it gets more attention because people tend to be more fascinated by swearing and because cases without more extreme tics are less likely to be diagnosed or require treatment. Tourette's makes it difficult or impossible to suppress random urges or unconscious thoughts, either physical or vocal. Some other verbal tics include repeating someone else's words or repeating your *own* words. Since these aren't as socially dramatic, they aren't as noticeable. Often people who hold in a tic experience a lot of distress and feel relief when they express it, whether it's a physical motion or swearing. People can usually feel it oncoming like you would a sneeze (90% of people with TS can feel it), and have varying degrees of success when they try to suppress it --- though it's typically exhausting to even postpone the expression of a tic. Attempting to suppress can also make it worse, leading to higher volume, and stress can further worsen the urge. Studies show that swearing provides greater relief of stress or anger (for most people, not just people with Tourette's) than saying random words, so it could be that swear words provide a better subconscious relief for sudden urges to speak even though they often cause the speaker more distress. As such, it may provide a more effective outlet for whatever mechanism triggers the tics, even though people aren't consciously choosing to swear. Think of it like when you stub your toe hard; many people swear, and those that don't are often putting in effort to *not* swear (though of course Tourette's is a lot harder to deal with).",
"Tics can vary wildly from person to person. While people often think of swear words or sexual words, that's actually pretty rare - or at least as rare as any other speciftword. They can have physical tics along with verbal tics and it's not uncommon for tics to change over time.",
"Swears are weird. There's been some research into how they fit into our brains, they basically get categorized differently than other words, and wired to be used impulsively. It's why when we drop a plate and yell \"Shit!\" it usually happens without us having to think of what word to use, it just happens (even when we sometimes would have preferred *not* to use a swear in that moment). Based on this, I would make an educated guess that tourettes is simply tapping into this natural shortcut and firing off the \"swear,\" button, which is spitting out whatever swears the individual would use if they dropped a plate or whatever. If the person with tourettes only ever said \"fiddlesticks,\" as a swear, they would probably say fiddlesticks a lot also.",
"If you’re talking about the sudden upswing of TikTok show cases of Tourette’s, beware. There are entire profiles with people being accused of basically cosplaying Tourette’s, autism, DID etc. it’s a sick trend"
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n78ov0 | How come when you're a kid and you're scared you wet yourself, but when you're an adult you can't pee infront of others when you're scared? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Piss inducing terror is different from having common social anxiety. And adults will deff piss themselves if frightened enough.",
"Urinating as a result of fear or stress isn't limited to children. In both adults and children, the same regions of the brain control bladder control and the response to stress. When you're in a stressful or terrifying situation, a part of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) sends signals (hormones) that trigger the \"fight or flight response.\" When your brain thinks that you're in a very dangerous situation, it listens to these signals over all others (including the signals from another part of the brain that help you to control your bladder) because they prepare your body to either stay and deal with the threat at hand or run from it. As adults, however, we're far more likely to be able to not only recognize a truly threatening experience, but know how to handle it. Children don't have that same ability or coping mechanisms."
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n798la | How fast would you have to travel to chase a sunset around the world/experience a neverending day? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The circumference of the Earth is around 40,000 km (25,000 miles). Earth rotates (relative to the Sun) once every 24 hours. 40,000 km / 24 hours = ~1667 km/h. 25,000 mi / 24 hours = ~1042 mph.",
"Depends on your latitude. In any case, you have to complete exactly one lap around the Earth’s axis of rotation every 24 hours. At the equator, you’d have to travel at 1,670 km/hr. At a latitude of 45 degrees, you’d have to go 877 km/hr. At the poles, you can just stand still."
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n7afix | Why is there only one piano, when you see multiples of other instruments in a composition? | I'm listening to Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwyn. Theres a single, prominent piano, and bombastic strings and brass behind it. But I'm curious why there's always just one piano. **Why is that?** Is it overpowering in sound? Cartoonishly heavy? If two pianos see each other do they fight for terrain? Or maybe it hasn't been done before. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My guess is because a piano can produce chords and harmonies by itself. The reason for multiple violins, for example, is to play different parts for chords and harmony. For the multiple instruments there is 1st chair, 2nd chair, etc. Each chair level plays different notes of the same music."
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n7all3 | There’s a plant that closes its leafs when it’s touched. How does it do this? | Plants obviously don’t have brains that can tell them to execute this reaction, nor do they have muscles to make this reaction happen. How does this work, then? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The plant is mimosa pudica, or sensitive plant. Venus fly trap also moves due to touch (thigmonasty... Gosh I called it thigmotropism in my day makes me feel old). Plants can move for other reasons too- light, gravity... The latter is how seeds and bulbs always grow their roots down and shoots up. So cool.",
"In a sense, they use their plant cells like muscle fibers. Just like muscle fibers, electrical signals or triggered when enough of the plant cells are touched, which causes specific ions to move in and make the cells turgid and tight, causing what you see as closing.",
"yep, pulls water from its leaves and back into the stem and lower part of the plant. Same idea if you have an arm or leg injured, your brain's priority is to keep blood near your torso and head to save your vital organs asap. Plants, while not sentient (having feelings), have the ability to know how to best survive in different circumstances."
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n7b091 | What's the appeal of large trucks? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most lift kits and large trucks became popular in the 1980s with Farmers, campers and off roading. It also quickly became a status symbol in rural areas. Besides the utilitarian use if it, it is also a uniquely American cultural thing.",
"Well for me it’s because I drive on unpaved roads a lot. But, I don’t have a large lift only 2” so I could fit better mud tires. But I get what your saying, I see trucks 3 times as large as mine that don’t leave the street.",
"Probably something similar to why people that buy sports cars that go 200+ mph; its an option and they can. There are very few roads that legally allow that speed but in the off chance you end up on one it'd be nice to be able to. Same with a truck fitting your description. They may never need it but if they do, they got it.",
"Marketing, and a weird trade war. Essentially, in the 60s, [the US introduced a tarriff]( URL_0 ) on light trucks as a response to European tarriffs imposed on US chicken products. As a result, domestic US car manufacturers got a huge advantage on sales of light trucks specifically, creating an incentive to market trucks specifically. This is in part where the idea of a pickup truck as a symbol of masculinity was created - essentially as a marketing campaign from US carmakers to sell more of a type of vehicle they had a market advantage for.",
"A lot of cars couldn’t handle the dirt roads I have to drive on, especially in the winter time."
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n7b0jr | why is partially hydrogenated oil deemed unsafe and banned by the FDA but regular hydrogenated oil is not? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Firstly its important to understand what saturated and unsaturated fats are. Fats in nature tend to be what we call triglycerides, this is a weird looking chemical, but essentially it consists of a thing called glycerol at the top, consisting of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon with three \"legs\" that consist of just carbon and hydrogen. Google an image of a triglyceride find out what I mean. You notice that this will consist of a carbon backbone with a bunch of hydrogen surrounding this carbon. Now these are pretty good at storing energy, turns out things that have a bunch of carbon and hydrogen in them but little oxygen tend to burn pretty well. Sugars have a higher proportion of oxygen in them which makes them less desirable as energy storage but are still used because they are smaller than lipids and thus easier to break down. Saturation refers to the question of how full these legs are of hydrogen molecules. Fully saturated triglycerides have these legs completely full of hydrogen, to the point where all bonds in the carbon backbone are either single bonds to other carbon atoms or bonds to hydrogen atoms on the sides. The symmetry here tends to make these legs nice and straight, these have very nice properties such as being solid at room temperature because their legs are nice and straight and not bent, they tend to settle into a solid pretty easily (imagine a bunch of toothpicks stacked perpendicularly, that's why butter is solid). Then there are unsaturated fats. They lack two or more hydrogen molecules in their legs, and instead those carbon atoms lacking a hydrogen make a double bond with their neighboring carbon molecule. Usually these double bonds make the leg \"kink\" and bend to one side (google saturated vs unsaturated fats for images). This is why say vegetable oils are liquid, these kinks prevent it from forming a nice dense solid at room temperature and instead keep the oil as a viscous liquid, as the kinks cause the fat molecules to tangle but not arrange nicely and close enough to solidify. Which brings us to the question of what is hydrogenation and why is it done. Fats in vegetables tend to be unsaturated, while fats in animals tend to be saturated. The traditional reason for this is because saturated fats hold more energy and this is useful for animals because this means less weight that they have to carry to get some amount of energy, while plants just don't care how heavy they become, they are grounded anyways and don't have a heating system to melt the saturated fats so that they can go where they are needed. But vegetables tend to be easier to raise than animals, including their fats. People use both saturated and unsaturated fats in cooking for their respective reasons, sometimes its useful to have a solid fat at room temperature. Point is people wanted to turn vegetable oils into a solid product, and for that we have to figure out how to saturate vegetable's unsaturated fats. Some smart people came up with the idea of hydrogenation, the idea is that under immense pressure we can force additional hydrogen atoms into unsaturated fats and saturate them further. What they found is that the process of hydrogenation sometimes makes fats that are known as trans fats. Normal unsaturated fats have this \"kink\" that I mention because in nature most plants make fats that are known as \"cis unsaturated fats\" meaning that the two hydrogens that are missing for unsaturated fat is found on the same side of the leg, which causes the leg to bend in that direction, nature is pretty good at crafting atoms together in a specific way and plants almost always produce cis fats. But trans fats occur when these missing hydrogen spots are found on the opposite sides of the legs, you can think of it that one missing hydrogen kinks the leg and the other kinks it in the other way because its on the opposite side, causing the legs to be straight. For a while this wasn't considered a problem, in fact this was considered good because trans fats, like fully saturated fats, tended to solidify well because the leg of the fat was not kinked, and it was cheaper for manufacturers in terms of the amount of hydrogen they had to put in and the amount of time spent saturating. This leg to them partially hydrogenating the fats rather than fully hydrogenating. And hell it was even better, because saturated fats have more calories in them than unsaturated. They could get the benefits of saturated fat's solidification without its calorie cost. But for whatever reason, trans have a pesky habit of getting stuck in your arteries, increasing the risk of heart attacks. Fully saturated fats have this too but for whatever reason trans fats tend to do this even more. So the solution has been to ban partial hydrogenation and move to full hydrogenation, eliminating trans fats."
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